Since my last post, I have seen the Ghanaian national football team in action for a World Cup qualifier (they beat a very good Benin squad 1-0 as a result of a relatively lucky goal in the first 3 minutes, and managed to barely hold on to that lead through stellar defending as Benin attacked and counter-attacked with intensity), had my pocket picked (before said football match – and knowing I was going to the stadium – I wasn’t carrying anything irreplaceable and lost the equivalent of $20 and a notebook), got sick, got well, got sick again (street food in Africa – sometimes you have no other choice – and sometimes you are better off just not eating at all), went swimming in the largest natural lake in Ghana, and finally, met Muammar al-Gaddafi.
The last of these occurred just last Sunday. I attended a festival to commemorate the ten-year anniversary of Otumfuo Osei Tutu II ascendancy to the golden stool. The golden stool is an important part of Asante (the I now know, correct spelling of “Ashanti”) mythology. After the Asante people were united by Osei Tutu II’s ancestor Osei Tutu I, some 350 years ago, Komfo Anokye (the high priest of the Asante) was said to have called down the stool from the heavens, where it landed in Osei Tutu’s lap – conferring on to him and his lineage the divine right to rule. Despite the stool being, well, a stool, it is made of pure gold and is never allowed to touch the ground. Thus despite it being a seat, the Golden Stool is carried around in a second throne along with the king.
Osei Tutu II has been instrumental in trying to restore traditional culture to the Asante people and across Africa as a whole. It is said that under his predecessor; a sort of complacent, and vaguely plutocratic malaise set in, however under Osei Tutu II, the culture has been reinvigorated and with it, a reaffirmation of democracy. Osei Tutu II has made education his cardinal issue and his stressed education of traditional Asante culture along with Western education for his people. I like Osei Tutu II. As far as monarchs go, he’s one of the good ones. He has put much of his personal wealth into a large education endowment for all Ghanaians, and not simply for his subjects; and has done much to bolster democratic institutions in Ghana, and pan-Africanism abroad. He is also a very big deal – widely considered one of the most important of the traditional kings in Africa. The New African made the 10-year anniversary of his coronation their cover story and published a 20-page interview with him.
Osie Tutu II is always immaculately clad in traditional clothing, and has asserted that African leaders should wear traditional costume when conducting affairs of state at home, rather than Western business suits which he sees as vestiges of colonialism. While I think he takes this argument a little far, I can appreciate the point he is trying to make. In the Asante region, the traditional fabric is called kente. It is a very thick cotton derived cloth that is hand died and woven, strand by strand into complicated patterns. Kente is very thick, and because of how labor intensive to make, it is very expensive. The different patterns woven into a kente garment have different meanings, and thus, the king has certain patterns that are unique to him; and only the royal kente weavers are allowed to produce. What is most amazing about kente is that it reflects heat. Despite being a very heavy fabric, it breathes wonderfully well, and actually helps keep you cool. The accoutrements worn by the king and his court, along with the kente are, of course, gold. Ghana is an enormous gold producer and it is found in abundance in the king’s procession.
The ceremony consisted of Osei Tutu II honoring various African leaders for their commitment to Democracy; including the former president of Botswana, Festus Mogae (a great choice: Mogae really is an outstanding leader - and has a wonderful first name to boot) and Nigeria’s former president Olusegun Obasanjo (not such a good a choice in light of Obasanjo’s capitulation to corruption, his attempted constitutional maneuverings at the end of his reign to erase term limits, and his parties’ very obvious rigging of the election for Mr. Yar’Adua); and Ghana’s own John Jerry Rawlings (a necessary choice, this is Ghana after all – but Rawlings only restored Democracy after 8 years of autocratic rule). This was nice; the focus was less on the king and more on those he opted to honor. Following this, the king did a traditional meet and great – which involves him being paraded around with the golden stool, the traditional tribal chiefs that make up his “court”, several hundred drummers, and half the population of Kumasi. The ceremony was held in the centre of the football stadium, and following the speeches, the crowd was allowed down onto the pitch to try their luck at meeting Osei Tutu II. The visiting dignitaries milled about and shook hands with people, many looking deeply confused as to what they should be doing. Including several others who were surprised to find themselves not awarded. Among these was, Colonel Muammar al-Gaddafi of Libya, who had gone all out for the occasion and had come with a freight air craft of gifts, including some 500 camels, the unloading of which had rendered Kumasi airport impassable for hours earlier in the morning. Gaddafi himself, traveled by land, all the way from Libya, as was his wont.
Colonel Q (as I like to call him, as the spelling of Gaddafi can also be translated Qaddafi, or 35 other ways from Arabic) is shorter in real life than you would think, or his legend would lead one to believe. He is also quieter and calmer, though of course, he remains larger than life. Flanking him was some 50 heavily armed bodyguards, whom he apparently always travels with. These bodyguards were all women – all crushingly beautiful, none under six feet tall, uniformly clad in sun-glasses and leopard print, form fitting fatigues and packing submachine guns. They are, without a doubt, the leggiest paramilitary force on the continent. It is confusing because you are not sure if you shoulf be turned on, or just terrified; which is how I suspect exactly how Gaddafi wants you to feel around him.
The Colonel is not very popular in Ghana, so there were few well-wishers anxious to talk to him, which gave me a good 10-15 minutes to talk to him. Gaddafi is a very nuanced speaker; he speaks more at you than with you, and in these long labyrinthine sentences. He takes special care to make sure that you understand everything that he is saying – and it is clear that as he has mellowed in the last decade, he is interested in winning Westerners over to him. There remains a hint of paranoia that whatever he says will be taken out of context and used against him, yet he seems to not be able to help but to talk; so he has become more careful in what he says. Despite strongly pushing his position, there is a great deal of nuance to his argument, and even when he is spouting vitriol against enemies (real or imagined) he can be, in a peculiar way, persuasive. We spoke in French with a few flourishes of Arabic. He thought the ceremony was very nice, had nothing but nice things to say about Osei Tutu II and Ghana as a whole.
He expounded on Palestinian nationalism, I pointed out that I enjoyed the nuance in the Colonel’s recent NY Times editorial on the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He wondered how it had been taken in the states; I told him people were surprised by it, which brought a smile to his face. We also talked a little about what he thought Libya leadership roll in the African Union should be. He is strongly committed to making things better in Somalia, but sees piracy as part and parcel to the economic ruin that has afflicted the country; and blames, predictably, Western exploitation of Somalia’s resources for its problems. He wanted to stress that Libya was a friend of America, that he liked Mr. Obama – who was a son of Africa. I managed to broach the subject of those Bulgarian AIDS workers – to which he answered that he still viewed them as guilty, while hinting strongly that he probably had made an enormous mistake in holding them; but that his position prevented him from admitting to having made the mistake. This effectively ended the conversation, and the Colonel grinned under his sunglasses, shook my hand and wished the grace of Allah upon me. And then he was gone, surrounded by his brigade of heavily armed beauty queens – another “son of African soil” (to borrow his term) - and one of the world’s great iconoclasts; equal parts reasoned and mad.
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Monday, March 23, 2009
Three Vignettes
Kejetia
Kejetia is a part of Kumasi that regularly draws national interest. Often referred to as “Little Lagos” in debates about its legality, Kejetia is part of the city in which laws and regulation have proven to unenforceable. It is effectively a miniature squatter city within Kumasi proper. The police do not go there, and society rearranges in accordance of different rules. To use a trite and perhaps culturally insensitive expression, it is a venue by which the “laws of the jungle” take precedence.
Kejetia presents as a densely packed commercial zone in which people sell everything from coconuts to bootleg DVDs, often in the middle of the street. Pedestrian casualties are remarkably high and traffic is often a nightmare. While the zone only stretches some five blocks, this stretch, by car, can take well over half an hour to traverse. While Kumasi by and large is not as congested as Accra, Kejetia is notorious as a miniature slum-village far worse than anything within Accra. Piles of plastic waste indicate the outliners of Kejetia, miniature urban landfills that Kumasi lacks the resources to move. Regions such as this are growing increasingly common in developing-world cities that have achieved a certain population density.
Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a business strategist based in Marin County, California, has written extensively on regions on Kejetia. “Squatter cities are vibrant. Each narrow street is one long bustling market.” Brand goes on to calls these regions “aspirational shantytowns” and declares them a potential cure for Third World poverty and an extraordinary profit-making opportunity. “How does all this relate to businesspeople in the developed world?” Brand asks. “One-fourth of humanity trying new things in new cities is a lot of potential customers, collaborators, and competitors.”
Despite this claim of vibrancy; and indeed commerce is brisk throughout Kejetia; it is the human misery and filth of the area that is most striking. One cannot traverse the region without being assailed by both vendors and beggars. Sick and dying people lie on the sidewalks behind stalls and conditions are dangerous. Pickpockets are omnipresent, and the difficulties of passing through the region mean that in the event of frequent accidents, the injured are inaccessible to ambulances. Thinking such as Brand’s fails to account for the human cost of this “economic vibrancy” and as regions such as Kejetia become more common (large swaths of Lagos resemble it) municipalities are hard pressed to either regulate, or more importantly, enforce exiting regulation in these areas.
Ashanti Occultism
When people from outside of the Ashanti region of Ghana talk about Ashanti culture they do so with something of a nod and a wink. Ashanti’s are seen as different from the rest. It is a warrior culture that remains deeply steeped in mysticism. Many traditional Ashant practices of old are said to persist in modified, and often clandestinely in unmodified, forms. The more occult, and we would say vulgar, of these traditions have come into conflict with modernity and have had to be altered according to certain perverse logics. A recent example involves the return to Ghana of the severed head of former Ashanti King Badu Bonsu II. (http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=159372) Said king, was executed in 1830 by the Dutch, the head was preserved in formaldehyde and has been on display in a small Dutch natural history museum. The recent discovery of the presence of this head by Ghanaian government has resulted in public outrage and the return of the head to Ghana for proper burial. This has elicited fears in some circles as to what the result of the heads return will be. Traditionally, heads of state are not buried alone. Human sacrifices are made to give the spirits of the deceased company. The longer a dignitary remains unburied, the more people need to be sacrificed with them. In the case of a 179-year gap between death and proper burial, there is no existing traditional rubric and so certain improvised macabre mathematics come into play.
While the practice of human sacrifice is said to have been discontinued by the Ashanti king and other ranking tribal chieftains; many will tell you, in hushed tones, that these practices still go on, but a conspiracy of silence prevails that prevents national discussion and investigation into these practices. Evidence for these claims is largely anecdotal, but the varying accounts seem to carry certain unifying features. A coworker of mine, whose father was a traditional chief, says that she had to flee her village, as it was feared for her life. This was because Ashanti chiefs traditionally are required to sacrifice their last-born child. This can be paid off in a blood ransom, in which large sums of money can be paid to protect the child, however, this does not mean that a human sacrifice does not still happen, with a poor vagabond often being abducted and sacrificed in their stead. The fear for my co-worker, as the last-born daughter, was that the refusal of her father to adhere to this practice would be met with reprisals by those that would. Only one case infanticide of this type has been reported nationally, several decades ago, but the investigation never materialized, disappearing into the maelstrom of folklore. Newspapers within the Ashanti region report the occasional disappearance, but these disappearances are rarely explained and the government has neither the budget, nor seemingly the will, to investigate.
Notably, many of these practices are said to take place in the evenings and in woods surrounding villages, where police authority remains external. What is most surprising is that many of the traditional tribal leaders are educated people who have traveled the world. I am told that often they take certain traditional drugs many of which may have psychoactive properties. People are then driven into spiritual frenzies in which they are willing to partake in many of these activities that they world otherwise condemn. One can see similar frenzies of spirituality occur at weekly church services here in Ghana, drawing an eerie parallels. Speaking in tongues, etc is not uncommon, and many of the adapted traditional religious practices that are now begin services, such as the cacophonous chanting by 3 or four “reverend ministers” at once (often resembling the “phase music” composed by Steve Reich) generate an otherworldly feeling in the listener. Many Ashanti’s will also speak of various supernatural occurrences experienced in youth, and performed by Ashanti priests and rulers. These include the summoning of animals, making the ceiling disappear, the relocation of starts, and possession. What is culturally striking is that many Ghanaians see these claims as being legitimate, but depending on their current religious allegiances, can see these occurrences as demonic acts that should be combated by the Church. What outrage that exists about these murders, in some circles, has more to do with the idea that these actions are taken to placate demons further deepening the existing outrage that human lives are being taken.
This again casts light on the striking religiosity of Ghanaians as a whole. People here seem hold to a very real sense of the supernatural. Again, it is notable that well educated and intelligent people will tell you that yes, these acts of “black magic” are real rather than simply discounting them as mythology. Many people also believe in wider-conspiracies such as the Illuminati, and will explain certain international policies and events by pointing to these beliefs. There is something then, something that is culturally embedded, that makes these ideas very real to many Ghanains. As far as Ashanti tribal practice, it is difficult then to ascertain how much of is fabricated and how much is legitimate, but what remains consistent is a widespread notion that things are not always as they seem. My visit to the Ashanti kings’ house and museum presented me with some anthropological details of traditional practices but many of these were brief and geared towards tourists. As is often the case, the official version of events varies from the private, and cultures have a tendency to guard certain things. Ashanti, and more widely, Ghanain culture’s particularity is a strong sense of the supernatural existing alongside the worldly and this manifests itself in ways that come to bear in how people view and interact with their world.
Catnapping Through
One of the first things one notices about Africans is that they never seem to sleep. People stay up late into the night, and arise very early in the morning, often seeming immune to fatigue. This mystery, or how and when people in Africa sleep had long puzzled me, until I began to realize that Africans sleep constantly throughout the day, but only for a minute or two at a time. I first noticed this while deeply involved in conversation. I was explaining something, when suddenly; my co-conversationalist seemed to drop off, only to rouse himself moments later. Deeply worried that my words had a soporific quality, I pressed for an explanation. My counterpart was unaware that he had slept at all. This did not reassure, however, as I continued to observe people here in Ghana, I began to see the trend. Sleep during the night may last only two to three hours, but this is compensated for by hundreds of stolen moments over the course of the day, multitudes of miniature catnaps often taken so quickly that they are nearly unnoticeable. The brain is given the opportunity to rest for brief periods, rather than all at once. How this is achieved, I still have no idea. My belief is that it has much to do with long-term cultural and environmental conditioning, and possibly biology. My attempts to replicate the same sleep schedule have only resulted in severe exhaustion. What remains most startling is the speed by which someone can move from consciousness to unconsciousness and back, often without realizing the shift. How this plays out in African psychology is no less elliptical. Perhaps Anatole France, Michael Leiris, and Colleridge would have drawn different conclusions on the nature of the dream world had they been born African.
Kejetia is a part of Kumasi that regularly draws national interest. Often referred to as “Little Lagos” in debates about its legality, Kejetia is part of the city in which laws and regulation have proven to unenforceable. It is effectively a miniature squatter city within Kumasi proper. The police do not go there, and society rearranges in accordance of different rules. To use a trite and perhaps culturally insensitive expression, it is a venue by which the “laws of the jungle” take precedence.
Kejetia presents as a densely packed commercial zone in which people sell everything from coconuts to bootleg DVDs, often in the middle of the street. Pedestrian casualties are remarkably high and traffic is often a nightmare. While the zone only stretches some five blocks, this stretch, by car, can take well over half an hour to traverse. While Kumasi by and large is not as congested as Accra, Kejetia is notorious as a miniature slum-village far worse than anything within Accra. Piles of plastic waste indicate the outliners of Kejetia, miniature urban landfills that Kumasi lacks the resources to move. Regions such as this are growing increasingly common in developing-world cities that have achieved a certain population density.
Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and a business strategist based in Marin County, California, has written extensively on regions on Kejetia. “Squatter cities are vibrant. Each narrow street is one long bustling market.” Brand goes on to calls these regions “aspirational shantytowns” and declares them a potential cure for Third World poverty and an extraordinary profit-making opportunity. “How does all this relate to businesspeople in the developed world?” Brand asks. “One-fourth of humanity trying new things in new cities is a lot of potential customers, collaborators, and competitors.”
Despite this claim of vibrancy; and indeed commerce is brisk throughout Kejetia; it is the human misery and filth of the area that is most striking. One cannot traverse the region without being assailed by both vendors and beggars. Sick and dying people lie on the sidewalks behind stalls and conditions are dangerous. Pickpockets are omnipresent, and the difficulties of passing through the region mean that in the event of frequent accidents, the injured are inaccessible to ambulances. Thinking such as Brand’s fails to account for the human cost of this “economic vibrancy” and as regions such as Kejetia become more common (large swaths of Lagos resemble it) municipalities are hard pressed to either regulate, or more importantly, enforce exiting regulation in these areas.
Ashanti Occultism
When people from outside of the Ashanti region of Ghana talk about Ashanti culture they do so with something of a nod and a wink. Ashanti’s are seen as different from the rest. It is a warrior culture that remains deeply steeped in mysticism. Many traditional Ashant practices of old are said to persist in modified, and often clandestinely in unmodified, forms. The more occult, and we would say vulgar, of these traditions have come into conflict with modernity and have had to be altered according to certain perverse logics. A recent example involves the return to Ghana of the severed head of former Ashanti King Badu Bonsu II. (http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=159372) Said king, was executed in 1830 by the Dutch, the head was preserved in formaldehyde and has been on display in a small Dutch natural history museum. The recent discovery of the presence of this head by Ghanaian government has resulted in public outrage and the return of the head to Ghana for proper burial. This has elicited fears in some circles as to what the result of the heads return will be. Traditionally, heads of state are not buried alone. Human sacrifices are made to give the spirits of the deceased company. The longer a dignitary remains unburied, the more people need to be sacrificed with them. In the case of a 179-year gap between death and proper burial, there is no existing traditional rubric and so certain improvised macabre mathematics come into play.
While the practice of human sacrifice is said to have been discontinued by the Ashanti king and other ranking tribal chieftains; many will tell you, in hushed tones, that these practices still go on, but a conspiracy of silence prevails that prevents national discussion and investigation into these practices. Evidence for these claims is largely anecdotal, but the varying accounts seem to carry certain unifying features. A coworker of mine, whose father was a traditional chief, says that she had to flee her village, as it was feared for her life. This was because Ashanti chiefs traditionally are required to sacrifice their last-born child. This can be paid off in a blood ransom, in which large sums of money can be paid to protect the child, however, this does not mean that a human sacrifice does not still happen, with a poor vagabond often being abducted and sacrificed in their stead. The fear for my co-worker, as the last-born daughter, was that the refusal of her father to adhere to this practice would be met with reprisals by those that would. Only one case infanticide of this type has been reported nationally, several decades ago, but the investigation never materialized, disappearing into the maelstrom of folklore. Newspapers within the Ashanti region report the occasional disappearance, but these disappearances are rarely explained and the government has neither the budget, nor seemingly the will, to investigate.
Notably, many of these practices are said to take place in the evenings and in woods surrounding villages, where police authority remains external. What is most surprising is that many of the traditional tribal leaders are educated people who have traveled the world. I am told that often they take certain traditional drugs many of which may have psychoactive properties. People are then driven into spiritual frenzies in which they are willing to partake in many of these activities that they world otherwise condemn. One can see similar frenzies of spirituality occur at weekly church services here in Ghana, drawing an eerie parallels. Speaking in tongues, etc is not uncommon, and many of the adapted traditional religious practices that are now begin services, such as the cacophonous chanting by 3 or four “reverend ministers” at once (often resembling the “phase music” composed by Steve Reich) generate an otherworldly feeling in the listener. Many Ashanti’s will also speak of various supernatural occurrences experienced in youth, and performed by Ashanti priests and rulers. These include the summoning of animals, making the ceiling disappear, the relocation of starts, and possession. What is culturally striking is that many Ghanaians see these claims as being legitimate, but depending on their current religious allegiances, can see these occurrences as demonic acts that should be combated by the Church. What outrage that exists about these murders, in some circles, has more to do with the idea that these actions are taken to placate demons further deepening the existing outrage that human lives are being taken.
This again casts light on the striking religiosity of Ghanaians as a whole. People here seem hold to a very real sense of the supernatural. Again, it is notable that well educated and intelligent people will tell you that yes, these acts of “black magic” are real rather than simply discounting them as mythology. Many people also believe in wider-conspiracies such as the Illuminati, and will explain certain international policies and events by pointing to these beliefs. There is something then, something that is culturally embedded, that makes these ideas very real to many Ghanains. As far as Ashanti tribal practice, it is difficult then to ascertain how much of is fabricated and how much is legitimate, but what remains consistent is a widespread notion that things are not always as they seem. My visit to the Ashanti kings’ house and museum presented me with some anthropological details of traditional practices but many of these were brief and geared towards tourists. As is often the case, the official version of events varies from the private, and cultures have a tendency to guard certain things. Ashanti, and more widely, Ghanain culture’s particularity is a strong sense of the supernatural existing alongside the worldly and this manifests itself in ways that come to bear in how people view and interact with their world.
Catnapping Through
One of the first things one notices about Africans is that they never seem to sleep. People stay up late into the night, and arise very early in the morning, often seeming immune to fatigue. This mystery, or how and when people in Africa sleep had long puzzled me, until I began to realize that Africans sleep constantly throughout the day, but only for a minute or two at a time. I first noticed this while deeply involved in conversation. I was explaining something, when suddenly; my co-conversationalist seemed to drop off, only to rouse himself moments later. Deeply worried that my words had a soporific quality, I pressed for an explanation. My counterpart was unaware that he had slept at all. This did not reassure, however, as I continued to observe people here in Ghana, I began to see the trend. Sleep during the night may last only two to three hours, but this is compensated for by hundreds of stolen moments over the course of the day, multitudes of miniature catnaps often taken so quickly that they are nearly unnoticeable. The brain is given the opportunity to rest for brief periods, rather than all at once. How this is achieved, I still have no idea. My belief is that it has much to do with long-term cultural and environmental conditioning, and possibly biology. My attempts to replicate the same sleep schedule have only resulted in severe exhaustion. What remains most startling is the speed by which someone can move from consciousness to unconsciousness and back, often without realizing the shift. How this plays out in African psychology is no less elliptical. Perhaps Anatole France, Michael Leiris, and Colleridge would have drawn different conclusions on the nature of the dream world had they been born African.
Thursday, March 19, 2009
Palm Tuesday
The spine of the road runs south from Kumasi with vertebrae like towns jutting from it in clumps. Townships are like this across West Africa, small, mobile, clinging to the road for dear life. They have almost entirely sprung up to fill economic niches – there is money to be made servicing weary travelers, though rarely much and the markets are overwhelmingly oversaturated. As cars slow as they pass through roadside villages, throngs of vendors mob vehicles, pushing identical wares. Economies of scale persist. One village sells only bread, mass produced, each loaf identical and priced identically. The next sell only dried banana chips.
I am traveling to Abogu, a cocoa farming village 120 kilometers south of Kumasi, though largely not on the Accra route. Abogu is one of the key villages that made up the old Ashanti kingdom, and thus constituted one of the seats of power for the old empire. These villages were selected strategically, often due to their proximity to important geographic features. In this case, Abogu lies at the foot of a small, though breathtaking, mountain that is thought to have mystical properties. The mountain is named Kidibo, and has been personified by the population. People claim to have met and befriended the mountain itself while wanderings the forest at night. To understand this notion, one must understand the characteristics of the animism that is still practiced in many more remote parts of Ghana. People’s conception of geography is that certain things, mountains, lakes and especially rivers (do to their movement) are living things that possess sentience. It is a sort of pantheism by which everything is endowed with a spirit that is capable of interaction under particular conditions. People respect the mountain, and understand it protects their cacao fields.
Cacao is enormously important to Ghana. A local proverb runs “Cacao is Ghana, Ghana is cacao.” It is the principle cash crop by which the country survives. It was first brought to Ghana in 1879, by a blacksmith turned national hero named Tetteh Quarshie. Quarshie had been living in Fernando Po and returned to Accra with Amelonado cacao pods, which he began cultivating into “black gold.” More colorful – read scatological- local versions of this story see Quarshie being prevented from leaving with cacao pods and so ingesting them in order to sneak them back to Ghana. Another version of this has Quarshie ingesting the pods accidentally, rather than purposefully and being surprised by the cacao plants that sprung up in his courtyard where he used the latrine some time later. This last version does not seem to give Quarshie enough credit, as he proved himself to be a very astute businessman, dominating the cacao industry in Ghana until his death in 1892.
At the moment, villagers only grow cacao. All of the value added processing is done elsewhere, but this may soon be changing. Villagers are well aware that the real money does not lie in actually growing the cocoa beans, but in the milling process that happens once the beans leave their village. The stranglehold of the cities in controlling cacao-processing stems from access to outside exporters. While villages have long demanded a relocation of processing plants, and the government now promises to meet these demands, Accra’s access to the Atlantic makes this difficult to implement. At the same time, cocoa growing has brought money and comfortable subsistence to the villages and increased international demand for cocoa beans over the last hundred years has seen standards of living continually improve in the villages. The status quo, while not an entirely equitable one, is not a terrible one.
Throughout the village one sees great piles of cacao beans sitting on tarps in the sun. Cacao grows in great silver sheaths that are broken open. The seeds or beans are then collected and placed in colanders under great weights and between layers of cloth to drain the water from them. The beans are then left in the sun to dry, before they are loaded into sacks and shipped out. I see two boys climbing a pile of dried beans, sacks in hand, while the proud parents look on. A passenger van pressed into service as bush-taxi and equipped with a loud speaker rumbles past, simultaneously broadcasting fares to Accra and loud gospel music. There is something surreal about the sea of dust and organ music that it leaves in its wake.
Today is Tuesday in Abogu, meaning that it is market day. Market day means everyone is in town, even if they do not need to go to market. The village itself meanwhile swarms with foreigners hawking all manner of wares. The pungent smell of dried and salted fish and a particular pungent root that is ground up and used as, and I am told conflicting stories, a medicine or an aphrodisiac fills the air. The smell of markets, across West Africa is unmistakable and remarkably similar from country to country. Market day is heavily embedded within village culture and is seen as something of a Sabbath day – and numerous superstitions outline evils that will befall cocoa farmers if they tend to their fields on said Sabbath. These superstitions seem almost overtly egalitarian, designed to prevent one cacao producer from gaining a leg up on his competitors, however the long handed down anecdotes, often of legendary status are known and often retold to assure adherence to this convention. Market day is important to village life in ways beyond simply the spiritual or commercial. Vendors bring not just goods but also news of the world outside the village. Issues of the day are discussed and anecdotes exchanged, often over palm wine.
Palm wine is an incredible substance. It is made from the sap of oil palms. Trees are tapped, the milky sap collected and fermented. Fermentation is very rapid; one might even say that it, in line with Ghanaian ecclesiastical sense, operates at a “Jesus-like” conversion pace. It usually takes less than a day before one has transformed a gallon of palm sap, into a gallon of palm wine. The strength, gaseousness and flavor of palm wine are dependent on how long one lets it sit. The freshest of palm wine has a negligible alcoholic content and is incredibly sweet. More mature palm wine can pack a punch, is quite bubbly, and has a distinct yeasty taste. The closest comparison I can come up with is a Belgian Lambique. Palm wine is served at “room temperature” (which here is generally outdoors, and quite warm) in Kalibashes, which are hollowed out gourds. One Kalibash was enough to make me feel groggy. More so than many other versions of alcohol, palm wine alters your perception of time, making everything feel as though it is moving in slow motion. The purity is not terribly high of the stuff, and the alcohol content tends to somewhat of a surprise, so one must be careful not to drink too much in a sitting lest one rue the following morning. For those that like to live dangerously, palm wine can also be distilled to create local liquors that hit well over 120 proof. This stuff is ingested only by the most dedicated of local drunks and can cause blindness, insanity and a multitude of other complications. Villagers tend to drink heavily in the country, in contrast with their tea-totaling urban counterparts. With the reverse of this true in Niger, where Islam was far more strictly interpreted in rural communities, I was somewhat intrigued by the juxtaposition of the two. With entertainment options limited in the country, palm wine and the converted living rooms where it is enjoyed are one of the few escapes from the monotony of agriculture.
As in much of the developing world, people live in close proximity to their animals. This means that, in country homes, living rooms and court yards tend to be congested with young goats, parades of chickens, goats, and the like. This is true in certain urban areas as well. Chickens tend to be omnipresent in urban gardens, and a trip to the Ashanti Kings home, (now more of a museum) in Kumasi saw the yard filled with peacocks. Peacocks apparently used to be quite common to Ghana, although the European craze for feathers during the 19th century nearly drove them to extinction. A veritable peacock holocaust if you will. Now they survive only as regal emblems – one of the arbiters of high social class. This seems somehow fitting. Peacocks are incredibly lazy birds and their plumage leaves them with limited mobility. They stand in stark contrast to the fast moving chickens and other fowl of the countryside, which seem to get their kicks by darting in front of oncoming motor vehicles and quite literally playing “chicken”.
The state of public health in the villages remains lacking. My traveling companion, a doctor at the hospital I work at, had come to visit his uncle, who through some peculiar family history is somehow over a decade younger than him. The uncle had contracted malaria and a prescription was dashed off to the nearest pharmacy. The drugs sent back were not those requested and could, I was told, could have caused further complications had they been taken. We traveled the short distance to the pharmacy to straighten things out, only to be greeted by a sign reading: “E.K. (and here I give initials to protect the guilty party): Amaning (sic) Liced Chemist.” The comedy of this was not lost on my compatriot. Thoughts of some magically endowed, though perpetually scratching pharmacist filled my mind before the reality, a very young, chemist appeared. The man put up a fight, but then eventually treated his mistake as being a very normal occurrence. This does not reassure. The pharmacist seemed more concerned with selling drugs than with patient health, a notion reinforced by the wide array of local “organic” cures present on his shelves (which the medical community in Ghana has been fighting to prevent from being sold, as many tend to be destructive to patient health). This scenario, I was told, is replayed ad nausea across much of rural Ghana. As far as village health has come in Ghana over the past few decades, and the state is growing more rigorous in how it licenses pharmacists, there is still some ways to go.
As the sun reached its crescendo across the afternoon sky, my travel companion and myself took our leave of the village. The ride was a slow going one, made all the slower by the dragging effects of the palm wine. As the coolness cast by the mountain fell further and further away, we were left with but the heat of the road and the attacks by desperate vendors as we fought traffic back into Kumasi.
I am traveling to Abogu, a cocoa farming village 120 kilometers south of Kumasi, though largely not on the Accra route. Abogu is one of the key villages that made up the old Ashanti kingdom, and thus constituted one of the seats of power for the old empire. These villages were selected strategically, often due to their proximity to important geographic features. In this case, Abogu lies at the foot of a small, though breathtaking, mountain that is thought to have mystical properties. The mountain is named Kidibo, and has been personified by the population. People claim to have met and befriended the mountain itself while wanderings the forest at night. To understand this notion, one must understand the characteristics of the animism that is still practiced in many more remote parts of Ghana. People’s conception of geography is that certain things, mountains, lakes and especially rivers (do to their movement) are living things that possess sentience. It is a sort of pantheism by which everything is endowed with a spirit that is capable of interaction under particular conditions. People respect the mountain, and understand it protects their cacao fields.
Cacao is enormously important to Ghana. A local proverb runs “Cacao is Ghana, Ghana is cacao.” It is the principle cash crop by which the country survives. It was first brought to Ghana in 1879, by a blacksmith turned national hero named Tetteh Quarshie. Quarshie had been living in Fernando Po and returned to Accra with Amelonado cacao pods, which he began cultivating into “black gold.” More colorful – read scatological- local versions of this story see Quarshie being prevented from leaving with cacao pods and so ingesting them in order to sneak them back to Ghana. Another version of this has Quarshie ingesting the pods accidentally, rather than purposefully and being surprised by the cacao plants that sprung up in his courtyard where he used the latrine some time later. This last version does not seem to give Quarshie enough credit, as he proved himself to be a very astute businessman, dominating the cacao industry in Ghana until his death in 1892.
At the moment, villagers only grow cacao. All of the value added processing is done elsewhere, but this may soon be changing. Villagers are well aware that the real money does not lie in actually growing the cocoa beans, but in the milling process that happens once the beans leave their village. The stranglehold of the cities in controlling cacao-processing stems from access to outside exporters. While villages have long demanded a relocation of processing plants, and the government now promises to meet these demands, Accra’s access to the Atlantic makes this difficult to implement. At the same time, cocoa growing has brought money and comfortable subsistence to the villages and increased international demand for cocoa beans over the last hundred years has seen standards of living continually improve in the villages. The status quo, while not an entirely equitable one, is not a terrible one.
Throughout the village one sees great piles of cacao beans sitting on tarps in the sun. Cacao grows in great silver sheaths that are broken open. The seeds or beans are then collected and placed in colanders under great weights and between layers of cloth to drain the water from them. The beans are then left in the sun to dry, before they are loaded into sacks and shipped out. I see two boys climbing a pile of dried beans, sacks in hand, while the proud parents look on. A passenger van pressed into service as bush-taxi and equipped with a loud speaker rumbles past, simultaneously broadcasting fares to Accra and loud gospel music. There is something surreal about the sea of dust and organ music that it leaves in its wake.
Today is Tuesday in Abogu, meaning that it is market day. Market day means everyone is in town, even if they do not need to go to market. The village itself meanwhile swarms with foreigners hawking all manner of wares. The pungent smell of dried and salted fish and a particular pungent root that is ground up and used as, and I am told conflicting stories, a medicine or an aphrodisiac fills the air. The smell of markets, across West Africa is unmistakable and remarkably similar from country to country. Market day is heavily embedded within village culture and is seen as something of a Sabbath day – and numerous superstitions outline evils that will befall cocoa farmers if they tend to their fields on said Sabbath. These superstitions seem almost overtly egalitarian, designed to prevent one cacao producer from gaining a leg up on his competitors, however the long handed down anecdotes, often of legendary status are known and often retold to assure adherence to this convention. Market day is important to village life in ways beyond simply the spiritual or commercial. Vendors bring not just goods but also news of the world outside the village. Issues of the day are discussed and anecdotes exchanged, often over palm wine.
Palm wine is an incredible substance. It is made from the sap of oil palms. Trees are tapped, the milky sap collected and fermented. Fermentation is very rapid; one might even say that it, in line with Ghanaian ecclesiastical sense, operates at a “Jesus-like” conversion pace. It usually takes less than a day before one has transformed a gallon of palm sap, into a gallon of palm wine. The strength, gaseousness and flavor of palm wine are dependent on how long one lets it sit. The freshest of palm wine has a negligible alcoholic content and is incredibly sweet. More mature palm wine can pack a punch, is quite bubbly, and has a distinct yeasty taste. The closest comparison I can come up with is a Belgian Lambique. Palm wine is served at “room temperature” (which here is generally outdoors, and quite warm) in Kalibashes, which are hollowed out gourds. One Kalibash was enough to make me feel groggy. More so than many other versions of alcohol, palm wine alters your perception of time, making everything feel as though it is moving in slow motion. The purity is not terribly high of the stuff, and the alcohol content tends to somewhat of a surprise, so one must be careful not to drink too much in a sitting lest one rue the following morning. For those that like to live dangerously, palm wine can also be distilled to create local liquors that hit well over 120 proof. This stuff is ingested only by the most dedicated of local drunks and can cause blindness, insanity and a multitude of other complications. Villagers tend to drink heavily in the country, in contrast with their tea-totaling urban counterparts. With the reverse of this true in Niger, where Islam was far more strictly interpreted in rural communities, I was somewhat intrigued by the juxtaposition of the two. With entertainment options limited in the country, palm wine and the converted living rooms where it is enjoyed are one of the few escapes from the monotony of agriculture.
As in much of the developing world, people live in close proximity to their animals. This means that, in country homes, living rooms and court yards tend to be congested with young goats, parades of chickens, goats, and the like. This is true in certain urban areas as well. Chickens tend to be omnipresent in urban gardens, and a trip to the Ashanti Kings home, (now more of a museum) in Kumasi saw the yard filled with peacocks. Peacocks apparently used to be quite common to Ghana, although the European craze for feathers during the 19th century nearly drove them to extinction. A veritable peacock holocaust if you will. Now they survive only as regal emblems – one of the arbiters of high social class. This seems somehow fitting. Peacocks are incredibly lazy birds and their plumage leaves them with limited mobility. They stand in stark contrast to the fast moving chickens and other fowl of the countryside, which seem to get their kicks by darting in front of oncoming motor vehicles and quite literally playing “chicken”.
The state of public health in the villages remains lacking. My traveling companion, a doctor at the hospital I work at, had come to visit his uncle, who through some peculiar family history is somehow over a decade younger than him. The uncle had contracted malaria and a prescription was dashed off to the nearest pharmacy. The drugs sent back were not those requested and could, I was told, could have caused further complications had they been taken. We traveled the short distance to the pharmacy to straighten things out, only to be greeted by a sign reading: “E.K. (and here I give initials to protect the guilty party): Amaning (sic) Liced Chemist.” The comedy of this was not lost on my compatriot. Thoughts of some magically endowed, though perpetually scratching pharmacist filled my mind before the reality, a very young, chemist appeared. The man put up a fight, but then eventually treated his mistake as being a very normal occurrence. This does not reassure. The pharmacist seemed more concerned with selling drugs than with patient health, a notion reinforced by the wide array of local “organic” cures present on his shelves (which the medical community in Ghana has been fighting to prevent from being sold, as many tend to be destructive to patient health). This scenario, I was told, is replayed ad nausea across much of rural Ghana. As far as village health has come in Ghana over the past few decades, and the state is growing more rigorous in how it licenses pharmacists, there is still some ways to go.
As the sun reached its crescendo across the afternoon sky, my travel companion and myself took our leave of the village. The ride was a slow going one, made all the slower by the dragging effects of the palm wine. As the coolness cast by the mountain fell further and further away, we were left with but the heat of the road and the attacks by desperate vendors as we fought traffic back into Kumasi.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Urban (and Exurban) Rhythm
Urban congestion in Kumasi is shocking. Though it is far worse in Accra, the traffic problems facing Kumasi – and this is a city whose entire metro area, extending out some 300 squared kilometers, rests at around 2.5 million – are staggering. Pedestrians are seriously imperiled in many places due to a lack of sidewalks, or sidewalks completely taken over by street vendors. Gritty and apparently fearless, the vendors in question risk life and limb, often darting into traffic to try to sell everything from dried fruit, roast bat meat (seriously, see below) to mobile phone credits to passing motorists. Traffic is unpredictable, moving from a brisk clip to an immobile lurch often in the blink of an eye. While traffic control devices are observed in places, order in general is beginning to break down as the city expands. Long-time observers will tell you that Kumasi is beginning to morph into a slightly smaller version of Accra – a city choked by insufficient lanes, too many motorists and a breakdown in law and order on the roads. Indeed, Accra has so heavily regressed that a strip of destroyed plastic posts marks a stretch leading into the city from the North. I am told that these posts used to work to divide lanes until someone hit one of them one day, and it was realized that they were not concrete at all, but rather just hard plastic. From then on, cars just drove through and over them, as was most convenient.
Roads themselves can often be a problem. Series of potholes mire routes, often leading to cars driving very quickly towards each other on the same side of the street in some perverse game of chicken; often narrowly missing each other. The skeletal burnt out chassis of past wrecks intermittently dot major traffic arteries like the remains of long extinct dinosaurs. These however, fail to serve as forewarning to drivers who have grown inured to these macabre landmarks. Though Kumasi boasts one of the countries few railheads, which gives it theoretical rapid freight access to Accra (and with it goods shipped along the Atlantic), due to poor maintenance of rail lines, and numerous delays (often causing goods shipped by rail, a mere 300km journey to take as long as week), trucks darting along the patchwork of roads that link Kumasi to Accra remains the predominant means of goods transit, with overweight trucks often snapping axels while traversing potholes and finding themselves stranded.
Kumasi is the capital of the Ashanti Region and the second-largest city in Ghana. The population of the inner city is just over 1.17 million people, but urban sprawl outwards has made it indistinguishable from its equally unplanned surrounding villages, resulting in the above mentioned metropolitan area population figure. Kumasi is an anchor of the Ashanti region, immediately in the hart of Ghana and thus the prosperity of these surrounding towns is tied to the economic and cultural health of Kumasi, which have flown into the city. In this sense, ongoing suburban expansion of Kumasi will reduce urban poverty by attacking the problem of rural to urban migration at its root by paradoxically eliminating the surrounding rural stretches that remain, or by pushing them farther from the urban core. This in turn can cause a whole new set of problems for the city. As these formerly rural and small town people gain affluence and achieve middle class, the plight of the car-based commuter is sure to plunge further into a phantasmagoria of traffic nightmare. The surrealism of inner city driving cannot be expressed in words. It must be experienced.
King Osei Tutu I of Asante founded Kumasi in the late 17th Century, on the advice of his senior priest: Komfo Anokye. (Anokye was also a formidable general and many, many cultural sites and public institutions, including the teaching hospital in Kumasi are named for him.) Situated at the crossroads of the Trans-Saharan trade routes, the town rapidly grew from a small imperially administered outpost to a trade town. It eventually became the capital of the Ashanti Empire as well as the cultural seat of the Kingdom. It boasts the first national cultural center (which I live across a major traffic artery from – a rare stretch of urban green space, dotted by the occasional museum, art gallery or library. It also boasts a rather nice, outdoor bar, which on Sundays at midday is unvaryingly populated by savage old drunks who make angry passes at the bar girls before collapsing upon themselves and being thrown out – and it is this type of alcohol abuse which leads many Africans not to drink at all. It is the hard-core alcoholics who make for the only point of reference.)
Kumasi had earned the accolade as the “Garden City” of West Africa due to the (relative) abundance of fauna and flora interspersing physical urban developments. The cultural center is dotted by a large number of these fauna trees which, without fail are filled with bats – which apparently have become something of a local culinary delicacy; granted though it is not one seems to have much found much of a taste in the circles in which I travel. These bats, beginning around 3 every afternoon take to flight in great swarms; blackening the air above the trees with their numbers, and sailing over merchants who sell their less fortunate brethren roasted on sticks in front of said trees. How they manage to get the bats out of these trees (as the bats perch very high up) remains a mystery to me.
__
While the Ashanti people are known for commerce, their favored pastime remains indisputably funeral attendance. While funerals are popular across Ghana, it is in the Ashanti region that funerals take special precedence in social life. While Ghanaians tend to be rather tight with their purse strings, a funeral turns everyone into a spendthrift. People go absolutely funeral mad. Prime time television boasts an hour-long program that features nothing but semi-identical funeral listings. People take out full-page ads in the newspapers, with particularly wealthy families even purchasing enormous roadside billboards announcing funerals. With the hullabaloo surrounding funerals, it is often almost a month before the deceased are actually put into the ground. Time must be given for any relatives living overseas (and special prestige is given to those funerals that can boast the greatest number of ex-pat relatives showing up) and to plan the party, catering, and drink service. Funerals here are not the dour affairs of the west, but rather are like Irish wakes to a factor of ten. They feature singing, dancing, and drunken merriment for which no expense is spared. They dwarf weddings in their scope. People make whole weekends of running the funeral circuit and employers do not hesitate to give employees the afternoon off to attend a funeral, despite the fact that many do every week.
This fixation on funerals seems counter-intuitive but in a way it almost feels healthier. Why not celebrate the life of a departed loved one rather than simply mourning the loss, though the element of keeping up with the Jones’, or in this case the now late Annan’s or, if you will, ex-Tokaradi’s does have a certain garishness about it. Commerce patterns reflect the prestige placed funerals. A vendor near my flat flogs deluxe coffins by the side of the road – these tend to look like a combination of a very chic refrigerator and 50s Cadillac, complete with ostentatious angelically themed hood ornaments.
__
The predominant national passion, when not ecclesiastical (see my previous post) or post-mortem is, of course, football. Ghana is the football powerhouse of West Africa, and people take a deep pride in knowing that the countries top players, including the sublime Michael Essien, play for top European clubs. People are not only avid followers of the local leagues as well as European leagues. (As far as local leagues go, you are either a Kumasi Asante Kotoko supporter or; a supporter of the wonderfully named, Accra Hearts of Oak; determined of course by geographical proximity to said club.) The favorite European clubs, of course, are those like Chelsea that boast a large number of African players (including the aforementioned Essien) or, those that are repeatedly successful; resulting in near omni-present support for Manchester United. Strangely, one of the most loved players in Ghana is the Liverpool employed, Finnish centre back, Sami Hyypia. He is something of a sex symbol to a certain subset of Ghanian women, but his popularity as a player among Ghanaian men remains somewhat inexplicable. The national team perform remarkably well internationally - especially for a country of Ghana's size and economic means, and are favorites to advance past the group stage in the forthcoming 2010 South Africa hosted world cup (an event incredibly heavily advertised across Ghana). The recent defeat in the final of the inaugural African Confederations Cup by the DR Congo has resulted in a national depression across Ghana, the end of the game appropriately coinciding with the onset of a massive thunderstorm. Ever resilient though, many people are already pointing to next years Africa Cup of Nations as a vehicle for both revenge and to re-embolden the national character. The success of the countries president is in some ways weighed by football results, and President John Atta-Mills appeared visibly distraught when briefly pictured on television upon Ghana going down 1-nill at the beginning of the second half. He was not shown when the game ended after the final result had been marked at 2-nill and Ghana’s defense had all but given up the ghost. Indeed, the controversial Atta-Mills may have detected the grim harbinger of knives being sharpened back in Accra with the final whistle.
__
As for me, I am enjoying my work here. I have been attached to the Research and Development unit at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (and there is Mr. Anokye name) and predominantly work on public health outreach (as it relates to urban planning) and research methodology. The work is interesting and my co-workers excellent, but I find myself working regular 12-hour days - such is the norm among professionals in West Africa. This position should also see me doing some travel across Africa as part of an anti-malarial availability project (the irony is not lost on me, having suffered from malaria while on anti-malarials) all of which I will of course document. I will continue as regular posting then, as can be managed.
Roads themselves can often be a problem. Series of potholes mire routes, often leading to cars driving very quickly towards each other on the same side of the street in some perverse game of chicken; often narrowly missing each other. The skeletal burnt out chassis of past wrecks intermittently dot major traffic arteries like the remains of long extinct dinosaurs. These however, fail to serve as forewarning to drivers who have grown inured to these macabre landmarks. Though Kumasi boasts one of the countries few railheads, which gives it theoretical rapid freight access to Accra (and with it goods shipped along the Atlantic), due to poor maintenance of rail lines, and numerous delays (often causing goods shipped by rail, a mere 300km journey to take as long as week), trucks darting along the patchwork of roads that link Kumasi to Accra remains the predominant means of goods transit, with overweight trucks often snapping axels while traversing potholes and finding themselves stranded.
Kumasi is the capital of the Ashanti Region and the second-largest city in Ghana. The population of the inner city is just over 1.17 million people, but urban sprawl outwards has made it indistinguishable from its equally unplanned surrounding villages, resulting in the above mentioned metropolitan area population figure. Kumasi is an anchor of the Ashanti region, immediately in the hart of Ghana and thus the prosperity of these surrounding towns is tied to the economic and cultural health of Kumasi, which have flown into the city. In this sense, ongoing suburban expansion of Kumasi will reduce urban poverty by attacking the problem of rural to urban migration at its root by paradoxically eliminating the surrounding rural stretches that remain, or by pushing them farther from the urban core. This in turn can cause a whole new set of problems for the city. As these formerly rural and small town people gain affluence and achieve middle class, the plight of the car-based commuter is sure to plunge further into a phantasmagoria of traffic nightmare. The surrealism of inner city driving cannot be expressed in words. It must be experienced.
King Osei Tutu I of Asante founded Kumasi in the late 17th Century, on the advice of his senior priest: Komfo Anokye. (Anokye was also a formidable general and many, many cultural sites and public institutions, including the teaching hospital in Kumasi are named for him.) Situated at the crossroads of the Trans-Saharan trade routes, the town rapidly grew from a small imperially administered outpost to a trade town. It eventually became the capital of the Ashanti Empire as well as the cultural seat of the Kingdom. It boasts the first national cultural center (which I live across a major traffic artery from – a rare stretch of urban green space, dotted by the occasional museum, art gallery or library. It also boasts a rather nice, outdoor bar, which on Sundays at midday is unvaryingly populated by savage old drunks who make angry passes at the bar girls before collapsing upon themselves and being thrown out – and it is this type of alcohol abuse which leads many Africans not to drink at all. It is the hard-core alcoholics who make for the only point of reference.)
Kumasi had earned the accolade as the “Garden City” of West Africa due to the (relative) abundance of fauna and flora interspersing physical urban developments. The cultural center is dotted by a large number of these fauna trees which, without fail are filled with bats – which apparently have become something of a local culinary delicacy; granted though it is not one seems to have much found much of a taste in the circles in which I travel. These bats, beginning around 3 every afternoon take to flight in great swarms; blackening the air above the trees with their numbers, and sailing over merchants who sell their less fortunate brethren roasted on sticks in front of said trees. How they manage to get the bats out of these trees (as the bats perch very high up) remains a mystery to me.
__
While the Ashanti people are known for commerce, their favored pastime remains indisputably funeral attendance. While funerals are popular across Ghana, it is in the Ashanti region that funerals take special precedence in social life. While Ghanaians tend to be rather tight with their purse strings, a funeral turns everyone into a spendthrift. People go absolutely funeral mad. Prime time television boasts an hour-long program that features nothing but semi-identical funeral listings. People take out full-page ads in the newspapers, with particularly wealthy families even purchasing enormous roadside billboards announcing funerals. With the hullabaloo surrounding funerals, it is often almost a month before the deceased are actually put into the ground. Time must be given for any relatives living overseas (and special prestige is given to those funerals that can boast the greatest number of ex-pat relatives showing up) and to plan the party, catering, and drink service. Funerals here are not the dour affairs of the west, but rather are like Irish wakes to a factor of ten. They feature singing, dancing, and drunken merriment for which no expense is spared. They dwarf weddings in their scope. People make whole weekends of running the funeral circuit and employers do not hesitate to give employees the afternoon off to attend a funeral, despite the fact that many do every week.
This fixation on funerals seems counter-intuitive but in a way it almost feels healthier. Why not celebrate the life of a departed loved one rather than simply mourning the loss, though the element of keeping up with the Jones’, or in this case the now late Annan’s or, if you will, ex-Tokaradi’s does have a certain garishness about it. Commerce patterns reflect the prestige placed funerals. A vendor near my flat flogs deluxe coffins by the side of the road – these tend to look like a combination of a very chic refrigerator and 50s Cadillac, complete with ostentatious angelically themed hood ornaments.
__
The predominant national passion, when not ecclesiastical (see my previous post) or post-mortem is, of course, football. Ghana is the football powerhouse of West Africa, and people take a deep pride in knowing that the countries top players, including the sublime Michael Essien, play for top European clubs. People are not only avid followers of the local leagues as well as European leagues. (As far as local leagues go, you are either a Kumasi Asante Kotoko supporter or; a supporter of the wonderfully named, Accra Hearts of Oak; determined of course by geographical proximity to said club.) The favorite European clubs, of course, are those like Chelsea that boast a large number of African players (including the aforementioned Essien) or, those that are repeatedly successful; resulting in near omni-present support for Manchester United. Strangely, one of the most loved players in Ghana is the Liverpool employed, Finnish centre back, Sami Hyypia. He is something of a sex symbol to a certain subset of Ghanian women, but his popularity as a player among Ghanaian men remains somewhat inexplicable. The national team perform remarkably well internationally - especially for a country of Ghana's size and economic means, and are favorites to advance past the group stage in the forthcoming 2010 South Africa hosted world cup (an event incredibly heavily advertised across Ghana). The recent defeat in the final of the inaugural African Confederations Cup by the DR Congo has resulted in a national depression across Ghana, the end of the game appropriately coinciding with the onset of a massive thunderstorm. Ever resilient though, many people are already pointing to next years Africa Cup of Nations as a vehicle for both revenge and to re-embolden the national character. The success of the countries president is in some ways weighed by football results, and President John Atta-Mills appeared visibly distraught when briefly pictured on television upon Ghana going down 1-nill at the beginning of the second half. He was not shown when the game ended after the final result had been marked at 2-nill and Ghana’s defense had all but given up the ghost. Indeed, the controversial Atta-Mills may have detected the grim harbinger of knives being sharpened back in Accra with the final whistle.
__
As for me, I am enjoying my work here. I have been attached to the Research and Development unit at Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (and there is Mr. Anokye name) and predominantly work on public health outreach (as it relates to urban planning) and research methodology. The work is interesting and my co-workers excellent, but I find myself working regular 12-hour days - such is the norm among professionals in West Africa. This position should also see me doing some travel across Africa as part of an anti-malarial availability project (the irony is not lost on me, having suffered from malaria while on anti-malarials) all of which I will of course document. I will continue as regular posting then, as can be managed.
Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Ghana: The Juxtaposition
With this post, I restore service to this blog after a multi-month lay off. The less said of my somewhat acrimonious departure from Peace Corps, and bout of malaria to boot, the better. Through providence of some form I now find myself in Kumasi, central Ghana, working as part of a Research and Development unit at a teaching Hospital. I’m also wearing a second hat, as I will be pursuing my research project in Urban Planning in West Africa – more on which is assuredly to come.
What first stands about Ghana is its habitability. Certainly, it’s hot - Africa is hot – but its not the same sort of oppressive knock you on your ass and drag you all around the block heat that Niger visits upon its denizens. Ghana has the advantages of relative government transparency, stability, a viable coast on the Atlantic, excellent agricultural land and a mixed export economy. Ghana is lush, almost central African in its climate and greenery (with the exception of the stretch of Sahel that runs through the very North of the country). Ghana is considerably developed, and a long-standing bastion of stability in the region. The first country in Africa to gain independence from its European colonizers, Ghana has seen fifty years of relative "popular", though not necessarily democratic rule. Nkrumah's regime proved to be initially popular - he was a dictator who was always said to have "made much of elections".
Most Ghanaians will tell you that his greatest sin was sticking around just a little too long after his natural expiration date. The same can also be said of the country’s two other nominal dictators: Akuffo and the still popular Jerry John Rawlings. Many Ghanians feel that partisan politics have done more damage to the country than the various militarily backed regimes have, resulting in mass support for many of the coups d'etats -. This has been so much the case that even after running the country through the military between 1981 and 1991, Rawlings was able to stand and be "re-elected" by a wide margin once Democracy was restored in 1992. A recent contested election has now seen the peaceful passage of power towards the opposition party, headed by the politically awkward John Evans Atta Mills, ending decades of PNDC dominance of Gold Coast political discourse. Many still have yet to make up their minds on Mills.
While Accra on the coast is choked with people – and is seeing a massive migration based population boom (which makes it an ideal candidate for my study), Kumasi, where I live, is far more pleasant. While streets are crowded and traffic can remain a nightmare, one does have the same feeling of congestion - a somewhat phlegm laden collapse of the windpipe that one feels in Accra on the streets of Kumasi. Kumasi gives its denizens some room to breathe, and this is crucial. It is located at the heart of the old Ashanti Empire, and many tribal customs dating back thousands of years are still at play, though the context for many of them has been shifted.
The bus ride from Accra to Kumasi was as pleasant as African mass transit gets (despite a multi-hour delay caused by a wheel well breakdown and the need to wait for a second bus.) Ghana, or all places boasts some absolutely beautiful rest stops – ones that would make even the Western world envious. I initially believed the stop to have been a heat-induced hallucination, until a Canadian missionary I made friends with on the ride reminded me, “welcome to heaven in West Africa.” He seems to have got it about right. Though Ghana is still a very poor country there is a genuine feeling of progress that seems to continually reinvigorate things. People are very friendly and incredibly hard working. There is a real protestant work ethic at work here. Which bring me to…
One of the more striking things about culture in Ghana is its religiosity. This is a country that is wantonly Evangelical. Gospel music pours from stereo systems and cellular phones. Most cars on the road boast large, emblematic placards praising Jesus. Most meetings begin with prayer and woe falls upon he who does not attend Sunday service. Services, deemed charismatic services - take on an almost Afro-American black gospel feel (though they are still very African) and are filled to brim with music, singing and dancing, and fiery sermons. A recent service I attended (again, those familiar with my now well-documented religious “predilections” take note, one really hasn’t a choice whether one wants to attend church or not if one is to integrate into the community) saw a visiting minister from England by way of Nigeria (if you can follow the logic – and there is a lot of very predictable baggage with Nigerians) expound on the virtues of wealth. The gentleman pointed out that the almighty indeed wants us to be wealthy and enumerated his own wealth, and making light of his Mercedes SUV that he apparently terrorizes his newly adopted London suburb with, between being hauled before the authorities for what came across as domestic violence (this was let slip through a failed analogy involving a “friend’s” dealings with the London Police Force - as related to personal completeness through God’s love through some discreet logic that I cannot even attempt to begin to comprehend, let alone master).
Certain biblical passages dealing with the vacancy rate in heaven for rich men and camels passing through the eyes of needles crossed my mind, and I was relieved to discover that the irony of the proceedings did not appear to have been lost on the other parishioners. How many rich men mounted on camels can dance on the head of a pin; and does this number supersede that of the number of angels to do the same? Which of them will pay more for the privilege? Such are the theological calculations of the plutocrat, but I digress. This parish was a small pleasant one, and apparently things get far more “energetic” at some of the mega churches, so for this I am thankful. The live band was also brilliant, working some traditional African poly-rhythmic renditions of what could otherwise of have been bland post modern (and surprisingly very ‘white’ sounding) gospel and perpetually injecting what can best be described as lightning into the proceedings. If going to church means listening to the band play every week, in the words of Moses Herzog as he discussed the possibility that he was losing his mind, “then that’s alright with me.”
What first stands about Ghana is its habitability. Certainly, it’s hot - Africa is hot – but its not the same sort of oppressive knock you on your ass and drag you all around the block heat that Niger visits upon its denizens. Ghana has the advantages of relative government transparency, stability, a viable coast on the Atlantic, excellent agricultural land and a mixed export economy. Ghana is lush, almost central African in its climate and greenery (with the exception of the stretch of Sahel that runs through the very North of the country). Ghana is considerably developed, and a long-standing bastion of stability in the region. The first country in Africa to gain independence from its European colonizers, Ghana has seen fifty years of relative "popular", though not necessarily democratic rule. Nkrumah's regime proved to be initially popular - he was a dictator who was always said to have "made much of elections".
Most Ghanaians will tell you that his greatest sin was sticking around just a little too long after his natural expiration date. The same can also be said of the country’s two other nominal dictators: Akuffo and the still popular Jerry John Rawlings. Many Ghanians feel that partisan politics have done more damage to the country than the various militarily backed regimes have, resulting in mass support for many of the coups d'etats -. This has been so much the case that even after running the country through the military between 1981 and 1991, Rawlings was able to stand and be "re-elected" by a wide margin once Democracy was restored in 1992. A recent contested election has now seen the peaceful passage of power towards the opposition party, headed by the politically awkward John Evans Atta Mills, ending decades of PNDC dominance of Gold Coast political discourse. Many still have yet to make up their minds on Mills.
While Accra on the coast is choked with people – and is seeing a massive migration based population boom (which makes it an ideal candidate for my study), Kumasi, where I live, is far more pleasant. While streets are crowded and traffic can remain a nightmare, one does have the same feeling of congestion - a somewhat phlegm laden collapse of the windpipe that one feels in Accra on the streets of Kumasi. Kumasi gives its denizens some room to breathe, and this is crucial. It is located at the heart of the old Ashanti Empire, and many tribal customs dating back thousands of years are still at play, though the context for many of them has been shifted.
The bus ride from Accra to Kumasi was as pleasant as African mass transit gets (despite a multi-hour delay caused by a wheel well breakdown and the need to wait for a second bus.) Ghana, or all places boasts some absolutely beautiful rest stops – ones that would make even the Western world envious. I initially believed the stop to have been a heat-induced hallucination, until a Canadian missionary I made friends with on the ride reminded me, “welcome to heaven in West Africa.” He seems to have got it about right. Though Ghana is still a very poor country there is a genuine feeling of progress that seems to continually reinvigorate things. People are very friendly and incredibly hard working. There is a real protestant work ethic at work here. Which bring me to…
One of the more striking things about culture in Ghana is its religiosity. This is a country that is wantonly Evangelical. Gospel music pours from stereo systems and cellular phones. Most cars on the road boast large, emblematic placards praising Jesus. Most meetings begin with prayer and woe falls upon he who does not attend Sunday service. Services, deemed charismatic services - take on an almost Afro-American black gospel feel (though they are still very African) and are filled to brim with music, singing and dancing, and fiery sermons. A recent service I attended (again, those familiar with my now well-documented religious “predilections” take note, one really hasn’t a choice whether one wants to attend church or not if one is to integrate into the community) saw a visiting minister from England by way of Nigeria (if you can follow the logic – and there is a lot of very predictable baggage with Nigerians) expound on the virtues of wealth. The gentleman pointed out that the almighty indeed wants us to be wealthy and enumerated his own wealth, and making light of his Mercedes SUV that he apparently terrorizes his newly adopted London suburb with, between being hauled before the authorities for what came across as domestic violence (this was let slip through a failed analogy involving a “friend’s” dealings with the London Police Force - as related to personal completeness through God’s love through some discreet logic that I cannot even attempt to begin to comprehend, let alone master).
Certain biblical passages dealing with the vacancy rate in heaven for rich men and camels passing through the eyes of needles crossed my mind, and I was relieved to discover that the irony of the proceedings did not appear to have been lost on the other parishioners. How many rich men mounted on camels can dance on the head of a pin; and does this number supersede that of the number of angels to do the same? Which of them will pay more for the privilege? Such are the theological calculations of the plutocrat, but I digress. This parish was a small pleasant one, and apparently things get far more “energetic” at some of the mega churches, so for this I am thankful. The live band was also brilliant, working some traditional African poly-rhythmic renditions of what could otherwise of have been bland post modern (and surprisingly very ‘white’ sounding) gospel and perpetually injecting what can best be described as lightning into the proceedings. If going to church means listening to the band play every week, in the words of Moses Herzog as he discussed the possibility that he was losing his mind, “then that’s alright with me.”
Wednesday, September 3, 2008
Living With Islam
The Mosque
Mosque design is different from that of the Catholic churches one sees across Europe. While the Mosques outwardly are beautiful – integrating a distinctly Arab/North African architectural style, the insides are notably barren with the exception of a few prayer mats, and a line on the wall indicating the direction of Mecca. This is because inside ornament is considered blasphemous as it may distract from the business of Allah’s greatness. Where Catholicism seeks to awe the onlooker with ostentatious displays of grandeur, Islam is more modest. Jesus saves, Moses invests and Muhammad, apparently, economizes. The grand mosque in Niamey embodies this. One of the three oldest mosques in the world, the grand mosque is enormous – its outside splendor matched only by its Spartan interior.
Dedication of the Hajji
Boubecar pours the tea from pot to glass back to pot. This action is two fold – to cool the tea and to dissolve the sugar into it. The coals smolders beneath the starlight. He takes a sip, smiles and pours me a glass, the tea sufficiently tempered and sweetened. Boubecar has been telling me about how he has been saving up to go on the Hajj. The Hajj – or the ceremonial Muslim trip to Mecca is very important to Nigeriens. It is a pious status symbol of sorts – an indication that they have somehow arrived spiritually. While the Koran states that one should attempt to make the Hajj but once in a lifetime – many Nigeriens go as often as they can afford as a sort of spiritual one-upmanship. To able to be called a Hajji insures one a certain social standing, as after all it requires a certain social and economic standing to be able to make the Hajj to begin with. Boubecar boasts that his father has made the trip three times during his lifetime – all three by airplane – partially subsidized by the Saudi government, who now runs a sort of lottery amongst pious Muslims to determine who they will allow to make the voyage every year. Airline travel has made what was a once in a lifetime journey a potentially annual occurrence for those that can afford it.
Boubecar’s grandfather made the journey in the days before air travel. He traveled by camel, until his camel died by the Egyptian border, from which point he traveled on foot – working odd jobs as he went. All in all – the voyage took him four years; two to go and two to come back. When he came back, he was different – always strangely aloof. He had seen things in those four years – along that desolate stretch of the Sihel and then the Sahara that connects Niger to Algeria, and then to Lybia, Tunisia and eventually Egypt. That stretch north, through the Middle East – through desert and conflict before reaching Mecca – a city built in the Middle of the desert. Four years of starvation conditions and desiccating sunlight for a ceremony that takes three days and culminates with the hurling of rocks. Four years in which his family grew and changed without him. He came back changed – both as though he had achieved nothing and everything but spent. He came back though, and in some way, that was enough.
I sip my tea. It is good, a warming sweat feeling fills me as I look up at the night sky and at the thousands of stars that reduce us – that definitively let us know where it is we stand in the cosmic order of things, and I stifle a laugh.
The Tightening In its Miscellany
Islam in Niger is hardly the Sunni orthodoxy that one finds in the Middle East. It is a blend, a mélange of animist traditions and Islam, many of the practices of which are in violation of what the Koran itself reads. As Nigerien Islam has advanced in the last couple of decades, becoming an increasingly brittle ideology, and as a progressively younger population is brought up in the tradition, one senses a sort of cultural tightening. Many of these traditions have taken on very strange bents. For example, it is now considered blasphemous for a man to pee against the wall standing up, and this for reasons that no one can quite remember. Initially I had believed this practice to stem from the lack of public toilets and the pervasiveness of latrines but I was soon put straight after being accosted in a Niamey back alley by a Sheik with an axe to grind. What this means is that one sees, squatting in front of walls, boys trying to have a piss. Clearly there is now something semi-idolatrous about accidentally pissing on ones shoes – a reflection of vigor and conviction in these decidedly “hedonistic times”. Upon demanding which hadith or Koranic passage indicated that men should pea sitting down - I was refereed to some bit or other dealing with general cleanliness of person – which seems in some ways contradictory to the likely outcome of squatting and firing away, but who am I to argue with a sheik. I promised to try it his way next time, then held my breath before convulsing with laughter – doing Camus proud - as one must in the face of the absurd.
The Tightening in its General
Sufi Muslims – despite Niger having been famous for its Sufism – have begun to be curtailed and disparaged widely. Sufis are Islamic mystics, known in equal measure for their violations of Islamic scripture (such as their celebrated uses of wine and narcotics)s a means of achieving certain universal truths that they feel are not accessible through strict adherence to Sunni doctrine. Sufi’s though, despite being described as “Islamic Hippies” are no intellectual slouches, with many of the most important of Islamic skeptics and thinkers coming from some vain of the tradition. Now Sufis are condemned almost universally across Niger, there additions to the religion ignored in favor of Sunni orthodoxy or animalistic superstition – the latter of which has also been used to keep women from moving.
Women have also suffered greatly as a result of religious tightening. Sunni orthodoxy holds that women are not be educated. The roll of the women is to be kept – as some form of ornament. A woman, according to strict Sunni scripture is to be given that which she desires and is not supposed to work, as she should never have any reason to. What this has meant in practice throughout Niger has been a strong societal push towards insuring that women never leave the household, despite their having to work to keep the household afloat. Women spend hours before every meal pounding millet (which ironically robs the plant of much of its nutritional value), fetching water, and disciplining children, often while their husbands are away – often not working throughout non-agricultural seasons. Often times, non-existent Koranic passages are bandied about justifying this, though often they are derived from traditional social structures. Unlike Iran, which has the mitigating influences of both relative wealth and a traditional sense in Persian culture that demands women be educated, Nigerien women are increasingly domesticated and forced into servile rolls. This is the religious tightening in its most damnable. To watch as the literacy rate among women continues to decline in many poorer parts of the country – at a rate far greater than that of men is the most telling evidence of this. The cloistering of women and the requirement in the East of Niger that the chador be worn at all times, especially by married women – whom are considered to be the “property” of their husbands - where previously it had been a subject of choice go far to further illustrate this point. Desertification drives poverty, while poverty drives religious fanaticism. The more lush, eastern parts of the country remain the far more liberal socially and the most mellow religiously.
Ramadan Part 1
And then one day Ramadan was upon Niger. There was a sudden depletion of street food; and of life on the streets in general, a dramatic marker for the start of the Muslim month of fasting. Where there was a flood of vendors, now there is a trickle, largely foreigners, selling food to children and the few, proud hedonists who upon making a purchase, guiltily disappear with their comestibles, fearing community reprisal by the few hungry fasters who can bring themselves to go about their regular routines. People, weakened by lack of food and water stayed indoors as best they could. This is, of course, the harvest season - forcing people into the fields while systematically preventing them from consuming water. The Koran states that the fast can only be broken prior to sun down in cases in which one is driven so mad by dehydration that “they can no longer distinguish between a black and a white strand of thread that is held before their eyes.” Those that ventured into the streets look drained and tired – a look of hunger fills their eyes. This must be a triumph of will over human necessity. I am told that people begin to become habituated, or perhaps a better way to say it would be inured, to the effects after the first couple of weeks of Ramadan. But now, at the beginning, things are hardly bearable for most. People sit in their houses, the cooking pot ready, waiting for the sun to go down. Dinners are dashed off at a hectic pace, with enormous quantities of food cooked – much of it going to waste. People’s moods rarely improve following the breaking of the fast as they now are ill from overeating. Ramadan remains a charged time. Domestic disputes increase, and everyone seems to be yelling at each other all the time. Children are beaten, often savagely for minor infractions. Everyone is on edge, at least until time, and resignation take the immediate cut from the pains of hunger.
Ramadan Part 2
The mosques begin their call an hour earlier during Ramadan. It is important to give people the time to wake up and eat before the sun comes up and they must start their fast. The imams that work in the megaphones attempt to sing the traditional Islamic prayers. They do no understand Arabic well, forming sounds often without grasping the meaning of the words, and fail to harmonize well – leading to a tuneless jumble, punctuated by speaker static that periodically shifts musical tonalities. The speakerphone equipped mosques take on a new urgency. Ramadan represents one of the principle pillars of Islam. These are the sinews that the religion is fashioned from. The month of fasting remains crucial to the pious Muslim, as a mechanism to demonstrate his or her dedication to the faith. Mosque attendance soars, not only because of the increased aura of piousness, but also, because it is a good way to kill time while one is waiting for the sun to go down so that one can eat. There is an element of emptiness, wrought by hunger that the mosques try to feed through spirituality. The old wither. The end of Ramadan is said to be a time of renewal – both spiritual, and in the sense of routine. The renewal of life, or normalcy, and of the feeling of not quite togetherness - a lightheadedness that the fasting causes. Perhaps then, Muhammad renews.
Mosque design is different from that of the Catholic churches one sees across Europe. While the Mosques outwardly are beautiful – integrating a distinctly Arab/North African architectural style, the insides are notably barren with the exception of a few prayer mats, and a line on the wall indicating the direction of Mecca. This is because inside ornament is considered blasphemous as it may distract from the business of Allah’s greatness. Where Catholicism seeks to awe the onlooker with ostentatious displays of grandeur, Islam is more modest. Jesus saves, Moses invests and Muhammad, apparently, economizes. The grand mosque in Niamey embodies this. One of the three oldest mosques in the world, the grand mosque is enormous – its outside splendor matched only by its Spartan interior.
Dedication of the Hajji
Boubecar pours the tea from pot to glass back to pot. This action is two fold – to cool the tea and to dissolve the sugar into it. The coals smolders beneath the starlight. He takes a sip, smiles and pours me a glass, the tea sufficiently tempered and sweetened. Boubecar has been telling me about how he has been saving up to go on the Hajj. The Hajj – or the ceremonial Muslim trip to Mecca is very important to Nigeriens. It is a pious status symbol of sorts – an indication that they have somehow arrived spiritually. While the Koran states that one should attempt to make the Hajj but once in a lifetime – many Nigeriens go as often as they can afford as a sort of spiritual one-upmanship. To able to be called a Hajji insures one a certain social standing, as after all it requires a certain social and economic standing to be able to make the Hajj to begin with. Boubecar boasts that his father has made the trip three times during his lifetime – all three by airplane – partially subsidized by the Saudi government, who now runs a sort of lottery amongst pious Muslims to determine who they will allow to make the voyage every year. Airline travel has made what was a once in a lifetime journey a potentially annual occurrence for those that can afford it.
Boubecar’s grandfather made the journey in the days before air travel. He traveled by camel, until his camel died by the Egyptian border, from which point he traveled on foot – working odd jobs as he went. All in all – the voyage took him four years; two to go and two to come back. When he came back, he was different – always strangely aloof. He had seen things in those four years – along that desolate stretch of the Sihel and then the Sahara that connects Niger to Algeria, and then to Lybia, Tunisia and eventually Egypt. That stretch north, through the Middle East – through desert and conflict before reaching Mecca – a city built in the Middle of the desert. Four years of starvation conditions and desiccating sunlight for a ceremony that takes three days and culminates with the hurling of rocks. Four years in which his family grew and changed without him. He came back changed – both as though he had achieved nothing and everything but spent. He came back though, and in some way, that was enough.
I sip my tea. It is good, a warming sweat feeling fills me as I look up at the night sky and at the thousands of stars that reduce us – that definitively let us know where it is we stand in the cosmic order of things, and I stifle a laugh.
The Tightening In its Miscellany
Islam in Niger is hardly the Sunni orthodoxy that one finds in the Middle East. It is a blend, a mélange of animist traditions and Islam, many of the practices of which are in violation of what the Koran itself reads. As Nigerien Islam has advanced in the last couple of decades, becoming an increasingly brittle ideology, and as a progressively younger population is brought up in the tradition, one senses a sort of cultural tightening. Many of these traditions have taken on very strange bents. For example, it is now considered blasphemous for a man to pee against the wall standing up, and this for reasons that no one can quite remember. Initially I had believed this practice to stem from the lack of public toilets and the pervasiveness of latrines but I was soon put straight after being accosted in a Niamey back alley by a Sheik with an axe to grind. What this means is that one sees, squatting in front of walls, boys trying to have a piss. Clearly there is now something semi-idolatrous about accidentally pissing on ones shoes – a reflection of vigor and conviction in these decidedly “hedonistic times”. Upon demanding which hadith or Koranic passage indicated that men should pea sitting down - I was refereed to some bit or other dealing with general cleanliness of person – which seems in some ways contradictory to the likely outcome of squatting and firing away, but who am I to argue with a sheik. I promised to try it his way next time, then held my breath before convulsing with laughter – doing Camus proud - as one must in the face of the absurd.
The Tightening in its General
Sufi Muslims – despite Niger having been famous for its Sufism – have begun to be curtailed and disparaged widely. Sufis are Islamic mystics, known in equal measure for their violations of Islamic scripture (such as their celebrated uses of wine and narcotics)s a means of achieving certain universal truths that they feel are not accessible through strict adherence to Sunni doctrine. Sufi’s though, despite being described as “Islamic Hippies” are no intellectual slouches, with many of the most important of Islamic skeptics and thinkers coming from some vain of the tradition. Now Sufis are condemned almost universally across Niger, there additions to the religion ignored in favor of Sunni orthodoxy or animalistic superstition – the latter of which has also been used to keep women from moving.
Women have also suffered greatly as a result of religious tightening. Sunni orthodoxy holds that women are not be educated. The roll of the women is to be kept – as some form of ornament. A woman, according to strict Sunni scripture is to be given that which she desires and is not supposed to work, as she should never have any reason to. What this has meant in practice throughout Niger has been a strong societal push towards insuring that women never leave the household, despite their having to work to keep the household afloat. Women spend hours before every meal pounding millet (which ironically robs the plant of much of its nutritional value), fetching water, and disciplining children, often while their husbands are away – often not working throughout non-agricultural seasons. Often times, non-existent Koranic passages are bandied about justifying this, though often they are derived from traditional social structures. Unlike Iran, which has the mitigating influences of both relative wealth and a traditional sense in Persian culture that demands women be educated, Nigerien women are increasingly domesticated and forced into servile rolls. This is the religious tightening in its most damnable. To watch as the literacy rate among women continues to decline in many poorer parts of the country – at a rate far greater than that of men is the most telling evidence of this. The cloistering of women and the requirement in the East of Niger that the chador be worn at all times, especially by married women – whom are considered to be the “property” of their husbands - where previously it had been a subject of choice go far to further illustrate this point. Desertification drives poverty, while poverty drives religious fanaticism. The more lush, eastern parts of the country remain the far more liberal socially and the most mellow religiously.
Ramadan Part 1
And then one day Ramadan was upon Niger. There was a sudden depletion of street food; and of life on the streets in general, a dramatic marker for the start of the Muslim month of fasting. Where there was a flood of vendors, now there is a trickle, largely foreigners, selling food to children and the few, proud hedonists who upon making a purchase, guiltily disappear with their comestibles, fearing community reprisal by the few hungry fasters who can bring themselves to go about their regular routines. People, weakened by lack of food and water stayed indoors as best they could. This is, of course, the harvest season - forcing people into the fields while systematically preventing them from consuming water. The Koran states that the fast can only be broken prior to sun down in cases in which one is driven so mad by dehydration that “they can no longer distinguish between a black and a white strand of thread that is held before their eyes.” Those that ventured into the streets look drained and tired – a look of hunger fills their eyes. This must be a triumph of will over human necessity. I am told that people begin to become habituated, or perhaps a better way to say it would be inured, to the effects after the first couple of weeks of Ramadan. But now, at the beginning, things are hardly bearable for most. People sit in their houses, the cooking pot ready, waiting for the sun to go down. Dinners are dashed off at a hectic pace, with enormous quantities of food cooked – much of it going to waste. People’s moods rarely improve following the breaking of the fast as they now are ill from overeating. Ramadan remains a charged time. Domestic disputes increase, and everyone seems to be yelling at each other all the time. Children are beaten, often savagely for minor infractions. Everyone is on edge, at least until time, and resignation take the immediate cut from the pains of hunger.
Ramadan Part 2
The mosques begin their call an hour earlier during Ramadan. It is important to give people the time to wake up and eat before the sun comes up and they must start their fast. The imams that work in the megaphones attempt to sing the traditional Islamic prayers. They do no understand Arabic well, forming sounds often without grasping the meaning of the words, and fail to harmonize well – leading to a tuneless jumble, punctuated by speaker static that periodically shifts musical tonalities. The speakerphone equipped mosques take on a new urgency. Ramadan represents one of the principle pillars of Islam. These are the sinews that the religion is fashioned from. The month of fasting remains crucial to the pious Muslim, as a mechanism to demonstrate his or her dedication to the faith. Mosque attendance soars, not only because of the increased aura of piousness, but also, because it is a good way to kill time while one is waiting for the sun to go down so that one can eat. There is an element of emptiness, wrought by hunger that the mosques try to feed through spirituality. The old wither. The end of Ramadan is said to be a time of renewal – both spiritual, and in the sense of routine. The renewal of life, or normalcy, and of the feeling of not quite togetherness - a lightheadedness that the fasting causes. Perhaps then, Muhammad renews.
Sunday, August 17, 2008
African Scenes
Bovine Abomination
A dead cow is lying in a ditch undergoing purification. On the first day, the cow had not been looking well - it was little more than an anemic mass of skin, bones and pustules - and it owners, knowing that the end was nigh had grudgingly abandoned it – quite literally putting it out to pasture. All the same, despite its slight mania at the end, charging about and bucking at phantom assailants, as if fighting death itself, the cow’s sudden collapse was in some way surprising.
The second day the buzzards came, and the smell: terrible and stomach churning greeted the countryside with an impermeable reek that stretched out for kilometers in every direction. The ants got to work after the buzzards had left, as did the maggots.
The third day, the smell worsened as purification intensified and the long chain fatty acids in the cow’s stomach were converted. The air became thick with the smell of bucolic acid.
The fourth day the odor became so intense that people could no longer think. All that remained was the head of the cow, but the rot again intensified. Those living in the adjacent field began their morning by stifling vomiting. The air seemed to hang thick with disease. People began to fall ill.
On the fifth day, the odor had subsided, leaving only a skeletal structure and a brown stain of dead plant life where the cow had been to remind a passerby of the cow’s existence. Thus, the cow had taken its revenge. Abandoned yes, but for days, impossible to ignore before its eventual restoration to the soil.
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Heavy Weather
Rain storms in Niger are primordial. One can actually watch the natural process by which the atmosphere transforms itself. The normally pale blue of the sky is supplanted with a light crimson that matches that of the earth. The cloud of red earth that gathers blots the sun, pushing everything into darkness, and this before the rain clouds gather. This is because the rapid change it atmospheric pressure sees enormous winds, as hot, high pressure systems collide with cold, low pressure ones; carrying clouds of dust. The air suddenly feels very heavy – then comes the downpour – which is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Rain drops the size of fists slash at the earth while the wind continues to whip the earth into frenzy. To be caught in a rainstorm is to be lashed and beaten by the physical force of the weather. The ground, which is largely light sand, is transformed into great pits of mud. Lost travelers caught in rain storms are said to drown in these pits. Then, within an hour of the storms passing, the water is filtered through the silt and the earth becomes again dry and sandy. This process is massively cooling and at times brings several hours relief from the oppressive heat of the days.
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Movement
Niger, despite the lack of buses, trams, subways and other typically western options, lives by mass transit. This is accomplished through bush taxis. Bush taxis tend to take the form of dilapidated late 70s vintage Peugeot station wagons that have an extra row of seats driven into them. Thus, a typical station wagon – and one should remember that the regular delineations of “seats” mean nothing to either the bush taxi operator or passenger – is able to accommodate upwards of 14 people, with luggage. Livestock that cannot be carried in hand, or be forced to ones feet is simply strapped to the roof. Thus one can sometimes expect to see live chickens at ones feet and live goats, and in one case, a donkey tied to the roofs of ones typical bush taxi. The bush taxis exist by their own laws of time. One spends hours waiting for a taxi and then hours again waiting for the taxi to reach capacity. Once a driver has secured a full load, the taxi is off, smashing over potholes on ill-maintained roads. The drivers know the roads well and avoid the worst of the axel destroying road obstructions. Police check points come and go – navigated via identification cards and occasionally hastily produced bills, accounts are settled between passing drivers going in opposite directions – occasionally seeing disputes in the middle of the road that can tie up traffic in both directions. Stops take place in towns where taxis are assaulted by local vendors pushing on one every manor of meat, confection and the rest, many of which are snapped up by hungry and weary travelers. There is a great deal of “off-roading” as often the bush provides for better driving conditions than the highways themselves. There exist two other things that can slow ones bush taxi ride – the 5 times daily call to prayer, which will see drivers temporarily abandon their vehicle, often in the middle of the road to stop and pray – and the breakdown, which, barring tools, can see one stranded, literally in the middle of nowhere until the next taxi comes around, which in some cases can be a matter of days. Water can run out quickly in Niger, with the heat of the sun making dehydration a constant and very real possibility people have been known to siphon blood off of livestock and the rest in order to survive a multi-hour bush taxi stop-over.
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Niamey By Night
Weddings in Niger take the form of daylong festivals and always seem to fall on Saturdays. Saturday is the marrying day and to throw a wedding on a different day is to violate the strict traditional rules by which Nigeriens operate. The wedding I had gone to was very nice, a friends cousin, and atypical in that, the level of education and affluence of the family saw a move away from the formless garments that characterize traditional Muslim dress towards, tighter, and dare I risk saying it, more physically “complimentary” attire for the women. A traditional Tuareg band played and people danced. African dance takes the form of conjoined circles in which everyone takes a turn at being “showcased”. This can be simply a variation on a dance step or an intrinsically complicated gesture. Both are treated equally in the eyes of the co-dancers. One up-manship exists, but is friendly, and always concludes with boisterous streams of laughter. Africans laugh like no other culture - and they do it frequently – a deep, head thrown back affair that seems to rumble from their very essence.
Following the wedding my friend asks me if I would like to go to a birthday party. I was supposed to be back at the training site hours ago, and I am already breaking every regulation that Peace Corps subjects trainees too, so I figure, why the hell not, any damage has already been done, and away we go, whisked across town in the back of a Niamey city taxi. Transportation around Niamey couldn’t be cheaper and taxis generally pick up people on route, although unlike bush taxis, traditional seats are observed. Thus, one is always in a full taxi but never compressed into a corner.
Niamey is the administrative capital and largest city in Niger. At only a million, it is relatively compact, but undergoing rapid expansion. The population of the city doubled in the last 15 years and is likely to triple again in the next 20. Like Lagos, in next door Nigeria, the ongoing encroachment of the desert is driving subsistence farmers from the land into the city. This means that the city is getting poorer and the new residents tend to be desperate, giving rise to parts of Niamey where one, especially an “Anasarra” or foreigner does not want to walk at night – making the omnipresent and low cost city taxis all the more necessary. Niamey itself is situated on the Niger River and divided into five administrative communes, four on the mainland and one taking the form of an affluent island in the middle of the river – which houses the heads of state, the countries banking sector and the University of Niamey.
We are the last in the taxi, and thus in purely egalitarian manner the last to be dropped off, which sees us given an informal tour of the city from the back of the cab. The different neighborhoods have very different characters. The grand market area is rife with vendors, while the small market sees the best fruit and produce sellers – making it a necessary point of visitation – while also boasting roaming bands of thieves and other brigands – due to its proximity to the Ecogar Wadata (the terrifying bush-taxi station/hub) and one must watch oneself. The region around the ministries is upscale and mired only by the omnipresent collections of prostitutes at nights, serving not Nigeriens, but foreign aid workers who have come for a bit of sex touristy as well.
My friend and I arrive at the bar that the party is being held; at only to be served kegged beer (a rarity in Africa) and fresh mutton. There are two competing beers in Niger – Biere Niger (or Giraffe – for the animal that gives its likeness to the label) and Flagg – which are almost indistinguishable from each other. The difference seems to be that Flagg is the stronger and ‘hoppier’ (making it the slightly more expensive) of the two. Flagg then is the drink for evenings and BN (so goes the acronym) of the late afternoons when the sun remains highest in the sky. We mix with the party guests, almost all overwhelmingly educated Nigeriens currently working with NGOs, with the occasional American. The French as it turns out, have failed to make much of an impact in development work in Niger do to their apparent inability to stay on and provide programming follow-up. This means that French development missions see the French show up, thrust handfuls of money at projects and leave, much to the frustration of their African counterparts. This makes Americans (because of the Peace Corps) joint-European, and surprisingly, Japanese missions very popular. My friend and I spend the evening with two certifiable and decisively drunken middle-aged University of Niamey professors. One of them teachers philosophy and elucidates on the finer points of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathprusta” in a formal and decidedly African old-world French while wildly dancing on the table – never missing a beat, either musically nor in the realm of rhetoric. The other is a professor of English literature, who has studied in England and proceeds to start argument after argument through his ongoing fallacious insistence that Martin Luther King said, or meant to say “I had a dream” rather than “I have a dream”.
At two in the morning, we are crammed into the Land Rover of a Rasta Dreaded head of a ministry who continues the debate on King’s words with the English professor while explaining his long standing dislike of Hausa music (which is sort of a wailing sub-Baliwood affair with sickeningly, almost diabetes inducing saccharine melodies and heavily compressed vocals), occasionally pausing to curse at over drivers as we drive (as can be the norm in Niamey) against the flow of traffic and on the wrong side of the road. Traffic laws then are rarely enforced leading to a sort of semi-anarchy on the roads, which at times follows strict regimental patterns but at times degenerates.
I eventually manage to hitch a ride, early the next morning, back to Hamdallaye, and manage, through a process of sweet-talking and obfuscation to avoid the tyrannical penalties that could float my way. My friend and I crack jokes about how much easier things will be once I have completed my spell in “école militaire”.
__
Literature + Illness = Illness (with apologies to Roberto Bolaño)
Nigeriens are sick all the time, and while in Niger I am sick all the time. Between the mind-altering medications and constant string of inoculations administered to me by Peace Corps, I have found myself mildly delusional most of the time. I have been reading Joyce, Borges, Nabokov and Cervantes and my dreams take on epic dimensions, mixing and matching, creating mélanges of stray thoughts, hopes and odd literary phrases, which I awake with on my breath. This is a form of sickness – a sickness of the mind in which my physical decline sees itself mirrored in my subconscious. My writing, when I can manage it, has taken on a disjointed semi-stream of consciousness. I write, like Bellow’s Moses Herzog, letter after letter, never to be sent - to be burned or thrown out or forgotten. Schoenburg and Said have become my bedfellows. My mind shifts from atonal composition to orientalism in alternating bouts. Fevers take me and then leave me. Illness does not make for great art. It makes for more illness, epic delusions of literary grandeur and post-modern tragedy. The negotiation of difference becomes a negotiation of the same and all meaning or allegory becomes null. All verse becomes frightening.
__
The Cellular Tower
There is one piece of infrastructure in Hamdallaye and that is the Cel Tel tower. It is a new addition to the landscape – a strange, looming monolith to technology surrounded by millet fields. It lights up at night – boasting its own generator, guard and razor wire topped wall. The cellular tower is in many ways forbidden – it’s clashing with its national environment reinforced by the protective measures necessary to insure the tower is not stripped for scrap by starving people. While it offers unprecedented access to information and technology, it remains unlikely that more than a handful of the town of Hamdallaye’s citizens will ever have the affluence necessary to acquire a cellular phone and make usage of the tower. Still, the tower is a major draw, especially during the evenings. Like with cargo cults in the South Pacific people flock to the Cel Tel tower. They dance around it. They sing. Cel Tel showing interest in Hamdallaye is a sign of progress. It shows that the town, the country is on the way up. It shows that mass dissemination of information is a possibility, even if just a remote one for the small towns on Niger. Or, conversely, it represents the shrewdness of Hamdallaye’s merchant class – to lobby Cel Tel, to get the tower brought to Hamdallaye to insure that the Peace Corps, with its unprecedented wealth – with its trainees that every 3 months deepen the towns coffers with their culturally atypical purchasing power will continue to fatten their coffers, remain in town. After all – the rumor had been that Peace Corps has been considering moving the training site - citing lack of cellular access and the escalating cost of satellite phone usage. Now with a push towards community based training – the site may be disseminated all the same, providing a major drain on the economy. Still, the Cel Tel tower will stand – a testament of what can happen when a handful of Americans are cloistered anywhere in the world and that potential to access to communication will remain.
__
The Old Man
The old man’s eyes are white and opaque. He stares up at the sky, where through the halos of cataracts he can make out the dim hint of the stars, so bright in his youth. The bright blotch to the East is Niamey. Cities he knows hate stars, they hate to be reminded of their own cosmic insignificance as it clashes with their own sense of self-importance. This is why the old man prefers the country. This is where, from the woven matt he lies on, he can still, though just barely, see the stars. He grins up at the sky and thanks Allah that his stomach is full – even if it is just with rice and sauce. He remembers the fish of his youth, seemingly more plentiful and the wild corn that he used to cultivate by the river. He remembers the peanuts he used to farm, the taste of them, how they wore against his teeth, teeth that can no longer pierce the sinews of meat. He has been sick. He has had holes cut in the back of his head and filled with herbs and other medicines. The cure always takes strength from him before it gives it back. He holds his child, one of many to him and point to the sky, explaining it to the child – explaining the cosmos as he understands them. The meat and sinews of a farmer, the sun of a farmers and the father of a farmer. He talks about how life has changed and how it is different. The more people. The radios, flashlights and mobile phones. Technology is transformative, but also destructive. He has connectivity now, but the family has become more disparate. Islam has intensified. He remembers a time when the men and the women used to eat together. Now dogma forbids it. The two spheres were once unified but now they are different. Traditional roles have been altered and hardened along lines that do not permit for further revision. The seamlessness of the increasing subjugation of women and his acquiescence to it. The population explosions and the reduction in firewood, in food, and standard of living for everyone. The extension of the nighttime – the lengthening of the day through technology – indeed the conquest of the night. Then, under the din of radios in the distance, and the braying of livestock, he sleeps.
A dead cow is lying in a ditch undergoing purification. On the first day, the cow had not been looking well - it was little more than an anemic mass of skin, bones and pustules - and it owners, knowing that the end was nigh had grudgingly abandoned it – quite literally putting it out to pasture. All the same, despite its slight mania at the end, charging about and bucking at phantom assailants, as if fighting death itself, the cow’s sudden collapse was in some way surprising.
The second day the buzzards came, and the smell: terrible and stomach churning greeted the countryside with an impermeable reek that stretched out for kilometers in every direction. The ants got to work after the buzzards had left, as did the maggots.
The third day, the smell worsened as purification intensified and the long chain fatty acids in the cow’s stomach were converted. The air became thick with the smell of bucolic acid.
The fourth day the odor became so intense that people could no longer think. All that remained was the head of the cow, but the rot again intensified. Those living in the adjacent field began their morning by stifling vomiting. The air seemed to hang thick with disease. People began to fall ill.
On the fifth day, the odor had subsided, leaving only a skeletal structure and a brown stain of dead plant life where the cow had been to remind a passerby of the cow’s existence. Thus, the cow had taken its revenge. Abandoned yes, but for days, impossible to ignore before its eventual restoration to the soil.
__
Heavy Weather
Rain storms in Niger are primordial. One can actually watch the natural process by which the atmosphere transforms itself. The normally pale blue of the sky is supplanted with a light crimson that matches that of the earth. The cloud of red earth that gathers blots the sun, pushing everything into darkness, and this before the rain clouds gather. This is because the rapid change it atmospheric pressure sees enormous winds, as hot, high pressure systems collide with cold, low pressure ones; carrying clouds of dust. The air suddenly feels very heavy – then comes the downpour – which is like nothing I’ve ever seen before. Rain drops the size of fists slash at the earth while the wind continues to whip the earth into frenzy. To be caught in a rainstorm is to be lashed and beaten by the physical force of the weather. The ground, which is largely light sand, is transformed into great pits of mud. Lost travelers caught in rain storms are said to drown in these pits. Then, within an hour of the storms passing, the water is filtered through the silt and the earth becomes again dry and sandy. This process is massively cooling and at times brings several hours relief from the oppressive heat of the days.
__
Movement
Niger, despite the lack of buses, trams, subways and other typically western options, lives by mass transit. This is accomplished through bush taxis. Bush taxis tend to take the form of dilapidated late 70s vintage Peugeot station wagons that have an extra row of seats driven into them. Thus, a typical station wagon – and one should remember that the regular delineations of “seats” mean nothing to either the bush taxi operator or passenger – is able to accommodate upwards of 14 people, with luggage. Livestock that cannot be carried in hand, or be forced to ones feet is simply strapped to the roof. Thus one can sometimes expect to see live chickens at ones feet and live goats, and in one case, a donkey tied to the roofs of ones typical bush taxi. The bush taxis exist by their own laws of time. One spends hours waiting for a taxi and then hours again waiting for the taxi to reach capacity. Once a driver has secured a full load, the taxi is off, smashing over potholes on ill-maintained roads. The drivers know the roads well and avoid the worst of the axel destroying road obstructions. Police check points come and go – navigated via identification cards and occasionally hastily produced bills, accounts are settled between passing drivers going in opposite directions – occasionally seeing disputes in the middle of the road that can tie up traffic in both directions. Stops take place in towns where taxis are assaulted by local vendors pushing on one every manor of meat, confection and the rest, many of which are snapped up by hungry and weary travelers. There is a great deal of “off-roading” as often the bush provides for better driving conditions than the highways themselves. There exist two other things that can slow ones bush taxi ride – the 5 times daily call to prayer, which will see drivers temporarily abandon their vehicle, often in the middle of the road to stop and pray – and the breakdown, which, barring tools, can see one stranded, literally in the middle of nowhere until the next taxi comes around, which in some cases can be a matter of days. Water can run out quickly in Niger, with the heat of the sun making dehydration a constant and very real possibility people have been known to siphon blood off of livestock and the rest in order to survive a multi-hour bush taxi stop-over.
__
Niamey By Night
Weddings in Niger take the form of daylong festivals and always seem to fall on Saturdays. Saturday is the marrying day and to throw a wedding on a different day is to violate the strict traditional rules by which Nigeriens operate. The wedding I had gone to was very nice, a friends cousin, and atypical in that, the level of education and affluence of the family saw a move away from the formless garments that characterize traditional Muslim dress towards, tighter, and dare I risk saying it, more physically “complimentary” attire for the women. A traditional Tuareg band played and people danced. African dance takes the form of conjoined circles in which everyone takes a turn at being “showcased”. This can be simply a variation on a dance step or an intrinsically complicated gesture. Both are treated equally in the eyes of the co-dancers. One up-manship exists, but is friendly, and always concludes with boisterous streams of laughter. Africans laugh like no other culture - and they do it frequently – a deep, head thrown back affair that seems to rumble from their very essence.
Following the wedding my friend asks me if I would like to go to a birthday party. I was supposed to be back at the training site hours ago, and I am already breaking every regulation that Peace Corps subjects trainees too, so I figure, why the hell not, any damage has already been done, and away we go, whisked across town in the back of a Niamey city taxi. Transportation around Niamey couldn’t be cheaper and taxis generally pick up people on route, although unlike bush taxis, traditional seats are observed. Thus, one is always in a full taxi but never compressed into a corner.
Niamey is the administrative capital and largest city in Niger. At only a million, it is relatively compact, but undergoing rapid expansion. The population of the city doubled in the last 15 years and is likely to triple again in the next 20. Like Lagos, in next door Nigeria, the ongoing encroachment of the desert is driving subsistence farmers from the land into the city. This means that the city is getting poorer and the new residents tend to be desperate, giving rise to parts of Niamey where one, especially an “Anasarra” or foreigner does not want to walk at night – making the omnipresent and low cost city taxis all the more necessary. Niamey itself is situated on the Niger River and divided into five administrative communes, four on the mainland and one taking the form of an affluent island in the middle of the river – which houses the heads of state, the countries banking sector and the University of Niamey.
We are the last in the taxi, and thus in purely egalitarian manner the last to be dropped off, which sees us given an informal tour of the city from the back of the cab. The different neighborhoods have very different characters. The grand market area is rife with vendors, while the small market sees the best fruit and produce sellers – making it a necessary point of visitation – while also boasting roaming bands of thieves and other brigands – due to its proximity to the Ecogar Wadata (the terrifying bush-taxi station/hub) and one must watch oneself. The region around the ministries is upscale and mired only by the omnipresent collections of prostitutes at nights, serving not Nigeriens, but foreign aid workers who have come for a bit of sex touristy as well.
My friend and I arrive at the bar that the party is being held; at only to be served kegged beer (a rarity in Africa) and fresh mutton. There are two competing beers in Niger – Biere Niger (or Giraffe – for the animal that gives its likeness to the label) and Flagg – which are almost indistinguishable from each other. The difference seems to be that Flagg is the stronger and ‘hoppier’ (making it the slightly more expensive) of the two. Flagg then is the drink for evenings and BN (so goes the acronym) of the late afternoons when the sun remains highest in the sky. We mix with the party guests, almost all overwhelmingly educated Nigeriens currently working with NGOs, with the occasional American. The French as it turns out, have failed to make much of an impact in development work in Niger do to their apparent inability to stay on and provide programming follow-up. This means that French development missions see the French show up, thrust handfuls of money at projects and leave, much to the frustration of their African counterparts. This makes Americans (because of the Peace Corps) joint-European, and surprisingly, Japanese missions very popular. My friend and I spend the evening with two certifiable and decisively drunken middle-aged University of Niamey professors. One of them teachers philosophy and elucidates on the finer points of Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathprusta” in a formal and decidedly African old-world French while wildly dancing on the table – never missing a beat, either musically nor in the realm of rhetoric. The other is a professor of English literature, who has studied in England and proceeds to start argument after argument through his ongoing fallacious insistence that Martin Luther King said, or meant to say “I had a dream” rather than “I have a dream”.
At two in the morning, we are crammed into the Land Rover of a Rasta Dreaded head of a ministry who continues the debate on King’s words with the English professor while explaining his long standing dislike of Hausa music (which is sort of a wailing sub-Baliwood affair with sickeningly, almost diabetes inducing saccharine melodies and heavily compressed vocals), occasionally pausing to curse at over drivers as we drive (as can be the norm in Niamey) against the flow of traffic and on the wrong side of the road. Traffic laws then are rarely enforced leading to a sort of semi-anarchy on the roads, which at times follows strict regimental patterns but at times degenerates.
I eventually manage to hitch a ride, early the next morning, back to Hamdallaye, and manage, through a process of sweet-talking and obfuscation to avoid the tyrannical penalties that could float my way. My friend and I crack jokes about how much easier things will be once I have completed my spell in “école militaire”.
__
Literature + Illness = Illness (with apologies to Roberto Bolaño)
Nigeriens are sick all the time, and while in Niger I am sick all the time. Between the mind-altering medications and constant string of inoculations administered to me by Peace Corps, I have found myself mildly delusional most of the time. I have been reading Joyce, Borges, Nabokov and Cervantes and my dreams take on epic dimensions, mixing and matching, creating mélanges of stray thoughts, hopes and odd literary phrases, which I awake with on my breath. This is a form of sickness – a sickness of the mind in which my physical decline sees itself mirrored in my subconscious. My writing, when I can manage it, has taken on a disjointed semi-stream of consciousness. I write, like Bellow’s Moses Herzog, letter after letter, never to be sent - to be burned or thrown out or forgotten. Schoenburg and Said have become my bedfellows. My mind shifts from atonal composition to orientalism in alternating bouts. Fevers take me and then leave me. Illness does not make for great art. It makes for more illness, epic delusions of literary grandeur and post-modern tragedy. The negotiation of difference becomes a negotiation of the same and all meaning or allegory becomes null. All verse becomes frightening.
__
The Cellular Tower
There is one piece of infrastructure in Hamdallaye and that is the Cel Tel tower. It is a new addition to the landscape – a strange, looming monolith to technology surrounded by millet fields. It lights up at night – boasting its own generator, guard and razor wire topped wall. The cellular tower is in many ways forbidden – it’s clashing with its national environment reinforced by the protective measures necessary to insure the tower is not stripped for scrap by starving people. While it offers unprecedented access to information and technology, it remains unlikely that more than a handful of the town of Hamdallaye’s citizens will ever have the affluence necessary to acquire a cellular phone and make usage of the tower. Still, the tower is a major draw, especially during the evenings. Like with cargo cults in the South Pacific people flock to the Cel Tel tower. They dance around it. They sing. Cel Tel showing interest in Hamdallaye is a sign of progress. It shows that the town, the country is on the way up. It shows that mass dissemination of information is a possibility, even if just a remote one for the small towns on Niger. Or, conversely, it represents the shrewdness of Hamdallaye’s merchant class – to lobby Cel Tel, to get the tower brought to Hamdallaye to insure that the Peace Corps, with its unprecedented wealth – with its trainees that every 3 months deepen the towns coffers with their culturally atypical purchasing power will continue to fatten their coffers, remain in town. After all – the rumor had been that Peace Corps has been considering moving the training site - citing lack of cellular access and the escalating cost of satellite phone usage. Now with a push towards community based training – the site may be disseminated all the same, providing a major drain on the economy. Still, the Cel Tel tower will stand – a testament of what can happen when a handful of Americans are cloistered anywhere in the world and that potential to access to communication will remain.
__
The Old Man
The old man’s eyes are white and opaque. He stares up at the sky, where through the halos of cataracts he can make out the dim hint of the stars, so bright in his youth. The bright blotch to the East is Niamey. Cities he knows hate stars, they hate to be reminded of their own cosmic insignificance as it clashes with their own sense of self-importance. This is why the old man prefers the country. This is where, from the woven matt he lies on, he can still, though just barely, see the stars. He grins up at the sky and thanks Allah that his stomach is full – even if it is just with rice and sauce. He remembers the fish of his youth, seemingly more plentiful and the wild corn that he used to cultivate by the river. He remembers the peanuts he used to farm, the taste of them, how they wore against his teeth, teeth that can no longer pierce the sinews of meat. He has been sick. He has had holes cut in the back of his head and filled with herbs and other medicines. The cure always takes strength from him before it gives it back. He holds his child, one of many to him and point to the sky, explaining it to the child – explaining the cosmos as he understands them. The meat and sinews of a farmer, the sun of a farmers and the father of a farmer. He talks about how life has changed and how it is different. The more people. The radios, flashlights and mobile phones. Technology is transformative, but also destructive. He has connectivity now, but the family has become more disparate. Islam has intensified. He remembers a time when the men and the women used to eat together. Now dogma forbids it. The two spheres were once unified but now they are different. Traditional roles have been altered and hardened along lines that do not permit for further revision. The seamlessness of the increasing subjugation of women and his acquiescence to it. The population explosions and the reduction in firewood, in food, and standard of living for everyone. The extension of the nighttime – the lengthening of the day through technology – indeed the conquest of the night. Then, under the din of radios in the distance, and the braying of livestock, he sleeps.
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