Asking permission

It is customary for visitors to the region to visit the chiefs, bring gifts, and receive their blessing to travel on the land. So on our first full day in Tamale, we put on our cleaner shirts and headed to the chief’s palaces. There were three that we were to visit, and two more of a modern day sort, the metro director of education, and the office of the mayor.

Jahanfo, the president of Sister Cities, ushered us into the portico at the Chognaa palace. Similar to ZoSimili Naa, the Chognaa palace was a compound of circular buildings, framed with a ten-foot wall and washed in a deep blue. While still cement, these huts were crowned with a conical thatched roof that allowed heat to escape. The thick walls and circular construction provided “natural air conditioning.”

The chief himself was traveling, but his deputy and village elders received us. The portico, three walled and roofed against the sun, was cool. Woven into the design of the walls were holes to keep the air circulating. Children from the village and palace peered through the slats watching the proceedings. Jahanfo presented the leader of our delegation, T., who in turn introduced us, beginning with chaperones and moving to seniors, juniors and our sophomore. He expressed our deep gratitude for the hospitality shown us, and presented the deputy chief with “a small token of our appreciation.” Though rumored to be fluent in English, the chiefs spoke to us only through their interpreters. With a wry smile, the deputy suggested that he had better open our gift to make sure it was suitable for the chief. His curiosity assuaged, we shook hands and piled back into the van.

We knew we’d arrived when the van drew up to the then familiar pattern of the palace compound. Gupkegunaa palace was painted yellow and the portico where we were received was a bright mint green. The chief sat on a dais in an ornately carved wooden chair, upholstered with brocade. He wore a heavy smock pleated at the waist, which left the fabric full around his hips. A white terry cloth hat framed his forehead and provided the setting for a large oval onyx. Thought the room was shaded, he wore his sunglasses through our audience. The keys and remote entry to his Mercedes dangled from his fingertips. Village elders sat with their back to the chief on the tiered steps leading to the dais or squatted against the wall of the portico.

We were ushered into two rows of plastic chairs. As before, the chief spoke through an interpreter, and again we followed the formal procedure of introductions and thanks. A cell phone rang, and one of the elders rose and walked to the open wall to take the call. Coming forward to offer our gift, T. kept his head below the level of the chiefs, nodding slightly as they shook hands. The chief scooped a handful of kola nuts from an aluminum kettle that sat by his chair and presented them to T. to distribute to us in a sign of welcome. The kola nut, the original source of flavor and caffeine in coca cola, is traditionally chewed in a social context throughout West Africa. We receive the chief’s blessing and welcome, shake his hand and return to the van.

At Dakpema palace, a pale blue compound and home of the “big chief”, the chief of Tamale, we were received inside. The chief sat barefoot, feet elevated on a leather hassock, his molded plastic chair draped in tapestry. We repeated the formalities again, Jahanfo presents T., T. introduces the group. But with the greater importance of this chief, the speeches were a little more formal, and more of our entourage rose to give testimony to our generosity, and we to their hospitality. The chief invited us to return the following day to the Damba festival, a cow would be slaughtered, and goats, and the meat would be distributed to the people. After the feast would be a procession, drumming and dancing. With this invitation, we received the chief’s blessing and another handful of kola nuts, and were ushered from the room.

Open Palms

“There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground” ~ Rumi

When we gathered for dinner in the library on Friday night, Mr. Issah, the headmaster, turned his palms to the ceiling and rested the backs of his hands on the table. He closed his eyes and offered a prayer. We bowed our heads with him, thanking Allah for our food and the warm hospitality.

Ghana, like many of its sisters and brothers along the 10th parallel has a Christian south and a Muslim north. The division arose because of the distribution of the tse tse fly. Sleeping sickness dissuaded the Muslim missionaries from traveling south of the 10th parallel. Later, Christian missionaries crossed Africa on foot braving the flies, and other illnesses encountered in the tropics to spread their faith south. Sudan, Somalia, and Ethiopia all lie along this longitudinal boundary and religious differences have ignited violence, and even civil war. To be a Muslim in a Christian village often means persecution or even death and vice versa.*

Ghana has avoided this travesty. While strife rules the surrounding countries, Ghanaians adhere to a strong national identity, while still cleaving to their faith. In Accra we passed Almighty Beauty Clinic and Trust in the Lord Cell phone accessories, while a noon or evening excursion in Tamale meant waiting for our driver to finish his prayers.

Mariama met us outside the First Baptist Church of Tamale where we waited with our driver. Her lean body and long stride bound by her Sunday dress, a bold pattern backed in blue with the scooped collar that suited her so well. She wore a gold cross at her neck. Her head was bare. “Oh ho!” The driver had joked as he picked us up: “you go to the night club on Saturday night, and church on Sunday morning.” But he drove us anyway. Mariama slid the wire from the top of the gate and ushered us into the compound. The gate closed behind us and she turned to secure it. We stood in the dusty, walled courtyard: the sanctuary to our left, and lower buildings ahead and to the right.

We found our way to an empty pew and the congregation swelled around us – women dressed in colorful patterns, men in suits. The preacher came to the microphone and launched a hymn, the reason, truly, I had come. There was a full band, drum set, keyboard, brass. The minister sang, while behind him a line of beautifully dressed women offered backup. The congregation sang out as well, and clapped, and swayed in their pews. The preacher’s voice rose over the singing and subsided into a sermon, it ranged back and forth between Dagboni and accented English. At times I loosed my grip on finding the meaning in the words and let the sound wash over me.

“Let us pray”, the preacher said, and Mariama, who I had seen only as a competent and laughing business woman, immersed herself in prayer, turning her palms to the ceiling and resting them on the back of the pew in front of her. She closed her eyes and her lips formed silent words. I bent my head with her thanking God for the kindness and generosity of our hosts.

* Eliza Griswold's The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line Between Christianity and Islam is well worth reading for more information on this topic.

Tamale

Tamale arrived in a mixture of sights, sounds and smells as we drive back and forth from Giddipass where we took breakfast, lunch and dinner, to the ZoSimili Naa Palace, our home during our stay. We learned roundabouts by the statues at their center: a soccer player (footballer!) by the stadium, the lion, the stone bowl fountain, a dignitary welcoming us, his palm outstretched. The palace was a cement version of the compounds we had seen from the air. Circular huts with conical roofs linked with a wall that contained the courtyard. ZoSimili Naa is painted white and is the Ghanaian home of Chief Susan who spends half of her time in Louisville. In addition to the circular rooms, a two bedroom square house comprised the back wall of the compound and provided us with a living room/gathering area, modern kitchen and additional space for sleeping.

We encountered the mingled scents of jasmine and burning plastic; rain in the dry season, evaporating before it hit the ground; the soft soothe of “Naa!”, (a conglomerate of “good” and “thank you” and “yes”) in response to our clumsy attempts at “Dasiba” (good morning) or “Autine” (good afternoon). Packed red dirt lined the roads, was swept into funnels and deposited as red dust across every surface. Shopkeepers swept the yards in front of their stalls clean with a hand broom of bound sticks, ushering debris and dung into smoldering piles. Everywhere else thin black plastic bags caught on grasses, trees, stones. Billowing with wind, they seemed to probe the earth like chickens, only their too-repetitive movement gave them away. Along with black bags, the clear ones that held purified water, maize milk, fufu balls, and any number of other food and drink that can be sucked from a pouch, tumbled along the ground.

Goats in the road seemed to more or less adhere to the rules, crossing when the way was clear, and speeding to a trot as a car approached. Accompanying them were cows, motorbikes, bicycles. Everything was carried on heads, fifty-pound bags of rice, animals in cages, five gallon bowls of fruit, or shampoo, or eggs. Metal trays heaped with produce, dried meat, sugared eggs, oranges, tomatoes, peppers.

On motorbikes, shoulders and heads served as the bed of a pick up: a trash can new, covered the body of the passenger, the driver held the lid, blue plastic. Eight and 10-foot two-by-fours balanced on a shoulder, hands free. A metal cot with springs was steadied between passenger and driver. And babies strapped to their mothers’ backs with a band of patterned fabric, their feet appearing to either side of her hips. Stalls lined the road painted in advertisements for Vodafone, Zain, and MTN, all made from corrugated steel with container doors that swing shut and padlock. The Muezzin sounded from the mosque. Outside men rinsed hands, heads and feet with water. In an open portico, others unfurled prayer rugs to the east, and knelt to pray.

You are Welcome!

The full entourage awaited us at the Tamale airport: the Headmaster of TISSEC and his administrative staff, and the full Sister Cities of Tamale committee. Their hospitality flavored every aspect of our visit. When we remarked on the fruit juice at dinner, we found it more frequently at meals. When we asked if we could find toilet paper at the market, a 12 pack appeared on our doorstep four hours later. At every step of our visit this generous group fed us, arranged for our transportation, accompanied us to the market, and saw to our every need and request. It took us a day or two to realize the softly accented “You are welcome” that ended most of our conversations was not an off-handed response to “thank you,” but a genuine statement of hospitality “You are welcome, here” and we were.

Accra

My stories were bound in counting to nine and in taking precaution against mosquitoes. But the story was also larger than the mundane, larger than the errands we ran: buying a new phone, SIM card, minutes, and water, always water. The story was of the vestiges of European colonialism it was the “No Loitering, No Hawking, No Begging” stenciled on the cement walls along the route, and the formal introductions, handshakes and nods that accompanied every meeting. It was of our driver navigating the van, overfull with luggage and people, past capacity, even, of the fold down seats, pulling over for a cop and then making a left turn against both directions of traffic from the median. It was of the men seated on skateboards crossed ankles resting before them and knees splayed wide, who propelled themselves between stopped cars with flip flops on their hands. It was the women walking so, so straight in the instant dark of the tropics, of trays of bananas, stainless steel bowls of bottled water, cloth, soap, meat balanced on their heads. It was the fruit stands on the roadsides with who knows how many varieties of fruits, and the corrugated steel stalls with fried whole fish, soccer jerseys, CDs. It was goats ambling against traffic, and the cement gutters two feet deep that dropped away from both sides of the road, open to catch an unwary driver’s wheel.

We pulled in for dinner at a local restaurant, and settled in for a meal of Banku, chicken, rice, and French fries. Banku, a fermented dough of cornmeal and cassava, is one of the many starches that lie at the center of Ghanaian diet. They vary from region to region and tribal group to tribal group. Feeling adventurous, I pinched off a lump of Banku, soaked it in the tomato-chili-chicken sauce and ate it. The fermenting leaves the starch sour, but it was pleasant enough and the sauce, delicious.

Though our internal clocks registered 3 p.m., it had been dark for two hours and the power on our hotel’s block was out. So, using flashlights, we erected our mosquito netting and slept knowing our 3 a.m. departure would come all too soon.

Ghana is a Good Place

T. walked up behind me as we stood in line at customs. “I lost my wallet,” she stated, looking paler than her usual brand of white. I took a deep breath. We were not yet 20 minutes in the country.
As promised Eric in his security vest met us before customs and welcomed us.
“Eh Girl! You have to be careful!” He said, on hearing our plight. But after easing us through customs, and escorting us past the hawkers, he helped us find the wallet. It had slid out of her pocket and between the cushions on the plane. With a quick word to an agent, the wallet was recovered. The trick was, ironically, getting it from the ticketing agents. The airport in Accra is not a big one, and the United agents who otherwise worked check in, were preparing the plane for its continuing flight to Lagos, Nigeria. We had to wait until the plane was cleaned, boarded and on the runway before the ticketing agents returned to their window. As we navigated back to the van and the rest of our crew, a security guard, who had helped Eric track down the wallet, paused us “Now you see that there are nice people here. Ghana is a good place.” And as we were to find again and again, Ghana is a good place.

Departure

It sunk in at 2:30 am. I am going to Ghana. Or as Rudyard Kipling puts it, Oh Best Beloved, to deepest darkest Africa. Outside our home on the edge of Louisville, a dusting of snow lined each branch. The forecasted low for the night, 11˚ F. In Tamale, our destination, already it was full light, and at 10 am, approaching the day’s high of 104˚F. I knew only a few basic facts: English is the official language, Accra the capital. We would be traveling to Tamale in the Northern Region. We would visit our sister schools of TISSEC and Dahin Shelie, and travel to Mole NP. We’d see birds, maybe elephants. We’d sleep under freestanding mosquito netting, coat ourselves in DEET, and not drink the water.

What stories would I find? What sights, smells, and sounds would greet or assault me? My bags were packed, my shots up to date. I’d taken my first malaria pill, and sprayed my clothes with permethrin. In the still-dark of that winter morning, I would rise, shivering, into my cold house, load my bags into the car, scrape ice from my windows, and venture off in my tropic weight clothes.

photograph courtesy of Michael Gaige

Returning to Ghana

This blog began as a chronicle of an 11,000-mile solo road trip, a voyage of discovery and self-discovery. But those journeys never truly end, do they? And so, though no longer between jobs, when I hit the road again, I was determined to continue the story. Traveling as a member of a delegation, sharing a room with two other women, and spending nearly every waking hour with nine high school students doesn’t accord one the space to unravel a story, to brush the dust off of yesterday’s details. And while I wrote daily, I struggled at it, seeking, but not finding, the capacity for reflection as we traveled.

But the stories have lingered, rising in dreams, in unbidden memories, in response to news, sounds, tastes, or to the fabrics that hang around my home. So, claiming my year, I have dusted them off. Much of the writing comes from my journals during our stay in Ghana, some from memory, or conversations with those who traveled with me, or before me. The urgency comes from the closing of a year, but also from the dawning of a new one, and as my stories of Ghana come to a close, I will be gathering new stories, sights and smells, new discoveries and self-discoveries in Ecuador as this adventure of life unfolds.

One further note: I traveled as part of a delegation from Kentucky Country Day School through the Sister Cities of Louisville program whose mission is to: “Promote peace through the respect we show, understanding we foster and cooperation we seek with our Sister Cities around the world - one individual, one community at a time.” I traveled with three other adults and nine students, whose names have been abbreviated for their privacy.