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Keta, Ghana
August 3, 2010
K. and I have been on the road for several hours. The rainy season has just ended and as a result the seasonal rains have left the roads in terrible shape. Our car pivots around man-shaped holes in the just-barely paved highway. Near the smaller villages, they return to dirt. The merchants and markets on the side of the road are veiled in a thin layer of red-brown dust. I’m always shocked by how dusty the air can be; by how much I’ve been spoiled by paved roadways (and I live in Baltimore City, the land of potholes). When the pavement ends, it just ends. There is no transition or sign. Like most things in Africa, you just roll with it.
The dusty red road, once smooth, has become a series of ridges and dips compacted by the enormous trucks that take this route. Trucks from Benin, Togo, Nigeria and Côte d’Ivoire, loaded twenty feet high with goods and fuel cans and anything else they can cram into these enormous vehicles, navigate these small dirt roads as if they were four-lane highways, barely slowing to avoid the women and children selling bread and food from baskets precariously perched on top of their incredibly balanced heads. You drive behind them praying that they won’t hit a bump at the wrong angle and flip over entirely. And on occasion you see the aftermath of the flip; they’re on the roadside, turned completely upside down, tomatoes and okra and ears of corn spread everywhere as if an explosion has gone off inside the bed of the truck. Our little car feels like the little man out. Our driver struggles with the roads. It’s obvious he is being careful with us—I want to tell him, “Just drive! Stop breaking! We can take it!” Although I’m not entirely sure I mean this. It’s easy to forget how bad the roads really are once you’re gone and back on the smoothness of the Baltimore beltway. Right now I’m aching from my center, because my body has been bouncing and swerving and unintentionally bracing itself since we landed. I’m exhausted just from sitting.
What once was a one hour car ride has become three because of these roads. We’ve decided our final destination is truthfully too far to travel today. We’ll be crossing the borders soon to Togo and then onto Benin and we know you should never do the border crossings too late. You would never want to get stuck in between the borders at night. The space between Ghana and Togo that has been declared No Man’s Land is a place I’d never want to spend the night. I hardly want to be there as we’re walking through the borders, navigating through all the insanity that happens here—the border agents who want your cash for lunch, or your hand in marriage (or both), the young men selling cassette tapes of Whitney Houston, hand luggage, bubble gum, and white dress shirts (from the same cart), the disabled children wheeling around begging for money, or the guys who want to “help you” get through the border (and to make some quick cash). The borders are overwhelming to all the senses and the worst part is that you can’t take any pictures to prove it. You gotta rely on your words and your memory to replicate the experience. From Aflao, Ghana to Cotonou, Benin you have to go through four major borders, each stop taking anywhere from twenty minutes to an hour, depending on the moods of the agents. Not to mention you have to drive through Togo to get to the last two borders. And it seems such a shame to just drive through Togo without stopping and doing something. If you don’t start early enough in the day, you don’t arrive at the final borders until dusk.
Night driving, in general, is a risk. I’ve heard terrible stories about night robbers, although I think most of these tales stem from urban legends and a tale told to small children about the “bush-men” taking you in the night, to prevent children from going outside alone at night. But the six year old girl inside me believes the stories because as soon as the day is over, the landscape goes black. Once the sun goes down, you lose your visibility of anything beyond 10-20 feet in front of you. The lack of streetlamps and only limited indoor electricity keeps the whole place pretty dim. And when the power blacks out, something that happens often because the power grids lack infrastructure and proper engineering, you’re dependent on a combination of fire and flashlights (if you’ve remembered to bring one). The child in everyone sort of wakes up, keenly aware of our lack of darkness in the US (because how often do we find ourselves somewhere that actually goes pitch black at night?), and all the pre-adolescent fears about darkness emerge into your consciousness and you realize what a wimp you’ve become and how much you’d suck if you ever found yourself on Survivor.
K. and I have decided to stop in a small village near the Togo border. This district is known as Keta, but this smaller, more residential area is known as Dzelukope. This is the home village of my dear friend, C. I’ve been here several times with C to visit her father and to take a necessary bathroom break on the way to the border crossings. But I’ve never really paid too much attention.
The area is really quite beautiful. We’re driving East and the Gulf of Guinea is on my right, smashing itself over and over again into a rocky, but beautiful coastline. But to my left is another vast body of water, the Keta Lagoon. I’m told this is one of the largest lagoons and wetlands in Ghana, covering about 1200 square kilometers. The roads leading to Keta are lined by small plots of land growing shallots, an interesting crop that supports this entire region. Local methods of irrigation are used and it’s pretty fascinating to watch. Being a coastal village, this is also an area for a lot of fishing and salt production. Early in the morning you hear it before you see it—the chanting and the singing and the rhythmic pulling in of the nets and the late afternoon dragging out of the nets. And the middle of the day drying out of the nets. It's quite a process and involves a lot of people.
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| Fishing in Grand Popo, Benin |
Over the last few years, I've taken to reading everything I can get my hands on about West Africa. I waiver somewhere in between being disgusted by the blogs and memoirs I read to feeling homesick and wishing I could be exactly where the author has taken me. There is an arrogance that even I have about these places; I can leave. I have big, fat US dollars in my pocket and a credit card with me in case something happens. Even in the spaces that I “rough it”, I can’t help but feel arrogant about my observations. How much space do I really have to comment? To pass judgment?
Almost all of these writers talk about the fishing villages. It’s really something incredible to watch. But it’s hard for me to ignore that this isn’t just a show for the tourists—these fishermen (and women) do this five, sometimes six, times a day, and it’s a part of the reality of life here. There is no shortage of hard work and it seems the fish, although keeping these small villages alive on market day, couldn’t possibly make anyone as much money as they’d like.
The beaches here are breathtaking. It’s hard not to think, for a moment, that you’ve discovered paradise. The beaches in the US are covered in crappy stores and neon signs and rental houses with fancy amenities. Even the most noncommercial beach towns have found a way to be commercial. Beaches sell. People love to sit on beaches for hours, burning our skin to a beautiful dark brown, and then lazily eating our weight in deep-fried fish and shrimp. But here, there is less room for luxury. And there is something very refreshing about that. I mean, there are certainly beaches in Ghana that have picked up on this idea of commercializing the beachfront. There are small shops selling shark teeth and seashells and beaded necklaces. There are bars on beaches and restaurants that overlook the sea. But even with those things, this area and the beach still serve a legitimate purpose. The beach is used for fishing and a stark contrast exists between the tourists on holiday, stretched out in the sand, while the locals pull in the nets. It's almost uncomfortable. It would be like putting million dollar condominiums in the middle of the inner city and telling the local people not to touch it (oh wait...Baltimore...didn't you already do that?).
It's also hard to ignore the history of these beaches. Most of these small coastal villages are dotted with three to six hundred year old trading forts, built by the Europeans, to trade gold and spices and slaves. Some of these structures are better survived than others and the ones that are still standing, and still open to the public, are dark and intense experiences. In most of these forts you can still the dungeons and caves where slaves were bound to each other and bolted to the walls. You can almost smell the death that happened within these structures. These realities, coupled with the white-girl-guilt-complex I seem to carry in my purse, can make these days emotional and exhausting.
As we're driving to our lodge for the night, we hit a point in the road where the lagoon merges with the sea. I’m fairly certain some kind of magic happens in these spots—these places where one thing becomes another. We ask W, our driver, to pull over so we can just sit and watch for a moment. The entire coastline is rather stunning. Hand-carved boats perch on the almost pink sand. Fishermen and women speckle the coast.
I mutter, "I think I've discovered Paradise." I quickly take my words back, watching a woman in the distance carry a giant bowl of water on her head. A woman in a small boat makes her way to the shore with the back half of her boat filled with reeds and palm fronds, I'm sure on their way to be dried and woven into something useful. A group of small children play around on the beach, singing to me in Ewe. I've been around Ewe-speaking people long enough, but the language is difficult to learn and there are tones used that my tongue has never attempted. I've mastered a handful of courtesy phrases, like "thank you" and "how are you?" but I only recognize one phrase in their singing: "Yevo". "White person". I remember feeling so offended by this on my first visit to the Volta region, thinking, how dare they call me out for being a white person!? Now I know the word is a harmless greeting, a humorous and sincere word and as far from rude as can be. If you want to get some giggles out of the children, you respond with "Amebo". "Black person". I always think to myself, What would happen to me if I did something like this in my own "village" in Baltimore City? I already know the answer to that and I laugh at my two divergent white girl roles in my two divergent worlds and how seriously we Americans take our words.
Behind me in a small shed built from scrap metal, an exhausted motor grinds cassava roots into a fine powder. Bags of sea salt line the road, collected and harvested by humans, not machines. Four or five people are bent over entirely, harvesting shallots from a small plot of land. I rethink my statement, embarassed to have been so boldly arrogant. Paradise for who, exactly? Paradise for me, the exhausted American woman who is tired of the pretention and novelty of the beaches along the East Coast? Paradise for the adventurer who wants to see and feel something really different and new? Who wants to immerse themselves in local African culture? Paradise for tourists on holiday who can afford the luxury of laying around in the sand, watching the locals work harder than I've ever had to work ever in my life?
We head towards our lodge, a really lovely spot to spend the night. The whole place has been westernized to keep the tourists comfortable and secure. I laugh at the inconsistencies and thoroughly enjoy my evening, sitting pool side, drinking local beer, eating freshly grilled chicken and jolloff rice (a delicious spicy rice made with tomatoes and peppers). A local man has dragged a television outside so that he can watch his "stories" poolside, too, while drinking local beer and making quick demands of the bar girl. This makes me laugh almost more than any of it.
The lodge itself is enormous; a series of long hallways connected like an octopus with a central front desk and restaurant adjacent to a pool and an outdoor bar. The rooms are actually very good for the price. A simple room with a small desk and chair, and a television that plays only two channels: the news and the African soap operas (dramas that are easy to follow and even easier to become addicted to because they play everywhere and in every hotel). A giant poster of Jesus is over my bed, along with a small chandelier, but the room is filled with mosquitoes, and I've had to cover myself from head to toe to avoid the bites that could be carrying all kinds of things that I probably don't want.
There is an air conditioner, a real luxury in these parts, but the room has been left open for however long the room has been unoccupied (which I suspect has been a while) and the small unit struggles to catch up, and I frankly would prefer the natural air, if it weren't for the mosquitoes. The bathroom has been tiled with outrageously fancy tile, creating an almost absurd affect to the traveler who has become accustomed to the basic amenities of a simple toilet, a large bucket, a water line running straight into the bathroom, and a drain in the corner of the room so that you can sponge bathe your way to clean. The bathtub is equally funny because it has been built almost like a tomb, nearly five feet high in the air, seperated from the rest of the bathroom by a shower curtain (another non-existent amenity in most hotels and lodges) and covered in the same absurd replication of an expensive Italian tile. A very expensive looking shower head is perched along the edge of the tub and I smile for a moment, imagining the bubble bath I might take later to soothe my aching center, and to process all the things I've been seeing and feeling these last few days. Not to mention, I might actually be able to shave my legs without falling over. There is still a large bucket in the room, which I will end up using to bathe myself in the morning (and to shave my legs) because the fancy looking shower head doesn't work and the tub doesn't appear to actually hold water for long, but I find the efforts of the lodge to be charming and I refuse to complain about it to anyone because who has the right to complain about such things?
K. and I decide we like this place. A lot. And that we're coming back with our students in January. And we're hoping that they experience all the things that we have and that they appreciate all the things that we do. And can laugh at all the same inconsistencies. And can feel heartbroken at all the same grave realities. And that they have the same moment of finding paradise here and losing it again, somewhere between the ocean and the lagoon.
Somewhere that looks an awful lot like this:
