Playing Tourist

Soloman met us at the airport with a small crew of friends, and turned our fourteen-hour layover into a guided tour of Accra. Our first stop was to the home of one of his friends where we put our luggage in a back room, confident we would find it at the end of the day.

We drove past the Flagship House, the Ghanaian version of the white house. We passed the National Theater and Parade Ground, past the national field hockey stadium (a highly competitive men’s sport here), and drove out along the ocean to a seaside restaurant and bar. Stretched along a plywood counter in the shade, we looked out over the ocean and watched fishermen set their nets. Their five-man wooden canoes plunged across the swells.

I finished my red red and fried plantains, flaked the last of the meat out of a whole fried fish then wandered out to sit in the shade of a palm tree. More canoes stitched the horizon. A black edge between the sky and sea protruded from the shore, it was the remains of an old slave fort where tribal men, women and children were loaded on to ships bound for the Barbados, Brazil and the United States.

We left the sea for another slice of Ghanaian history: the Nkrumah Mausoleum - the burial site of the first democratically elected leader in West Africa. After pursuing an extensive education in the US and traveling to Canada and London, Nkrumah returned to Ghana in 1947 and became a leader in Ghana’s independence movement from Britain. Ironically, the marble monument rests on the old polo grounds – a vestige of colonialism from which black Ghanaians were excluded during the British rule.

Our last stop of the day was at a roadside kiosk, where Soloman jumped out of the van to negotiate prices before we showed our white faces. Several of us piled out to pick up Ghanaian soccer jerseys. The storekeeper laughed when I chose #3 Gyan – the Black Stars striker who put the US out of the World Cup. Soloman, still laughing, pointed out Gyan’s airbrushed portrait as we headed back to pick up our luggage.