Filed under: May, The North | Tags: Bawku, crime, internet cafe, migration, Research
Off to the dodgy bits today – Bawku, Garu, and the far east of northern Ghana, towards Togo. Bawku has had a tribal conflict going on for a long time – depending how you reckon it, either from the eighteenth century when the Mamprusi came south to settle the Kusasis’ land and the Kusasi were never compensated, or from the 2000s when they started to kill each other in the streets with homemade pistols and AK’s and G3’s of unknown origin. I spent the day talking with the locals about this, and they all assured me that every household in the area is armed. This does not lead to peaceful behaviour in an area plagued by vendettas.
While I was in Accra earlier this year, there was fighting and people died. One man was stoned to death in the market. News permeates the rest of the country when something happens up here, but does not stick because the North and South are so divided – people in the South tend to think of the North as backward and the dispute as a little crazy. I found out when I got there that while I was away in England during the last few weeks, violence broke out again and ten people were killed. Bawku itself is under a military curfew, so I didn’t plan to stay the night.
Getting off the 6am bus from Bolgatanga to Bawku, I met Jacob, an electoral commission official who works in Garu, the next town down the line. As we walked to the Garu bus together, he told me that during the 2008 election, which was a tough one and exposed a lot of social fault lines in the North in particular, the ruling party had expected to win. When the votes were counted and he announced that the opposition had won, a crowd gathered to come and take the ballot boxes. He had to sleep in the polling station with the army guarding it, while the town rioted outside with automatic weapons. ‘This is a tough place,’ he said wearily.
This is my second brush with a country making the transition to democracy, and again I am surprised and impressed at how, in a place where citizenship can sometimes be an unrewarding and difficult process, some people step up to make the process work, even at the risk of their lives. As Jacob and I drove around, I discovered he has a minimum of three jobs to make ends meet because the government does not pay him a living wage, but as an electoral commissioner, he is rock solid.
Garu has an internet café. It consists of a single computer in the local priest’s office, running off a GPRS modem. The place is pristine, possibly the nicest café I have been to yet. Unfortunately the profits go to the church, so unless I can swing an interview with the Pope, I can’t count it as one of my target population. Nonetheless, Garu was worth the trip.
I also met Dan, who works at MTN (the mobile phone network) in Garu. The phone companies post their younger employees in the remotest places, then after a couple of years they can ask for a transfer. Dan is the most bored person I have ever met. Garu does not have a bookstore, he has no internet connection at the office, and he didn’t even speak the language when he arrived. Plus people keep shooting each other. Overall, not a great first job. He is hoping to study banking when he gets out – I promised to send him books if I could to break the tedium.
Then back to Bawku, where in the town’s only internet café I met Bernard, a young man who studied a masters in diplomacy at Amsterdam and was hoping to come back and apply his knowledge to his hometown’s problem. However, Ghana appears to have rejected him. He has been applying for jobs for a year, and cannot get so much as an internship either with his own government or with foreign NGOs. He is baffled. He thinks the only way to go is to take a PhD and work internationally instead, so we talked about options in Europe and the US. He wants to research ways to resolve the Bawku conflict.
It is bizarre that the Ghanaian authorities are not using him. In a town where people get burned and stoned to death at regular intervals, where people look at strangers as if they are spies, and the children don’t play in the streets any more, there is a trained diplomat who grew up there and wants to help provide a solution. He is smart, he is multi-lingual and multi-cultural. He could probably actually have some kind of impact. And he can’t even get a job making tea. In Ghana, if you don’t come from a powerful family who can place you, a job is hard to get. Most good jobs are sinecures, given to people who are not qualified but know somebody. Meanwhile someone like Bernard stands on the sidelines, waiting and applying to colleges abroad.
Back from Bawku to Zebilla, where there is a small café teetering on the edge of disaster in a town where there are not quite enough literate people to support it. It’s a lottery – will it create a customer base before it goes bust?
Outside Zebilla on the way back to Bolgatanga, a small handpainted sign by the side of the road says:
NO WATER
NO LIGHTS
NO VOTE.
Possibly the most reasonable political discourse I have heard since coming here.
The country is beautiful at this time, as the rains are starting. Everything goes bright green, in contrast to the red roads and sand. There are kids selling shea fruit by the side of the road. The fruit look like gooseberries, taste like shea butter and make your fingers smell sweet for a day after you eat them.
Zebilla to Bolga
A long procession of guineafowl make their way across a rice field, looking very important.
A sign by the side of the road with a huge photograph of elephants: ‘Northeast Migration Corridor: all animals have the right of movement.’ The animals are migrating to find food and rear their young, and some international organisation has paid for a big sign to state their right to do so. I am tempted to go to the Libyan coast where the small boats set sail for Europe, and post a huge sign stipulating that people have the right to do the same thing.
I finished my day at the internet café in Bolga where my online survey is supposed to be happening, but mysteriously has not been showing any results. Mystery solved: it seems the manager was worried that if people took the survey, I would have to spend money paying for the free time online that I offer them in return. I explained that this was the point, and she was amazed. Now, hopefully, there will be responses.
It’s Sunday, and I’m in Bolga, and I seem to have malaria again. Yesterday was a hell of a day. My ‘assistant’ (found when the person Doris suggested went to Kumasi) turned out to be an illiterate mechanic’s assistant with no English, who didn’t know what an internet cafe was. I realised this when we drove straight past the first one, which had a huge sign saying ‘internet cafe’. So I paid him off and did my first interview of the day.
On our way to do the interview, in the prospective interviewee’s car, a small child ran out in front of us and he hit her. It happened in slow motion – I saw her, he didn’t, I shouted ‘stop’, he didn’t, she went down. He was only doing 10 miles an hour, but that’s enough to kill someone.
Amazingly, she wasn’t badly hurt, just bumped (what are small children made of? rubber?) so the people watching didn’t have to beat or burn my new friend alive. This is what usually happens up here when you hit someone and get out of your car to see if they are ok. People will lynch you on principle. So the general understanding in Ghana (shared by the police) is that you should hit and run, then report the accident to the police and come to the hospital later to see if the person is ok, and to pay for treatment if needed. The problem with visitors who are not Ghanaian is that when we see a toddler get hit by a car, we tend to exit the car to see if they are alive. This made the driver nervous, but in the end she seemed to be ok and we were able to take Lazaritu (her name) and her mother to the hospital.
Ghanaian hospitals are just something else. I had no illusions about them – my idea of a good hospital here is one without visible rats or sewage kicking around. But the triage people (i.e. the administrators who check if you can pay or not) sent this little girl to the back of the queue because her mother was poor and they were uninsured. If a 3-year-old hit by a car doesn’t constitute an emergency, what does? My new friend waved some money and sorted it out, and they admitted her for observation.
Somehow everyone survived the day, and when we returned later to check on her, Lazaritu was being discharged, apparently fine. My interviewee, who speaks a different language from the mother (there are 8 to choose from here in a 100km radius, and no common dialect) and could therefore not communicate with her at all, brought a friend who spoke Frafra and could talk to her. She told him that the child was ‘very stubborn’ and had run out in front of a car just the month before. I wanted to suggest tying little Lazaritu with string to her mother’s waist, but was overruled.
I continued interviewing. By 4pm I was weak, thirsty, hot and dizzy, and fell into a drainage ditch. I was just attributing this to heatstroke, when I remembered that I did this last time and turned out to have malaria. So instead of going home for Sunday and the public holiday on Monday, I went to find a clinic for a test. It was lucky I did, since they were all closed until Tuesday and kept telling me to come back then. In areas where there are not a lot of non-Africans, people tend not to know that 3 days of malaria is more than enough to kill someone who doesn’t have any immunity. You can die in 24 hours (though I seem not to get that kind – not to tempt fate).
Interestingly, none of the clinics suggested that I go to the main hospital. They seemed to consider this the same as waiting till Tuesday for their services, and they were probably right. Plus, one would undoubtedly come out of the hospital having caught something worse than whatever sent one there in the first place. Finally, at the last clinic in town, a doctor was standing behind the receptionist who sent me away. As my cab pulled away, the receptionist ran back out and said ‘doctor says you wait small, he will call lab tech.’ So they got a very nice bloke called Martin to come back from whatever he was doing on Saturday night, take some blood, and tell me that yes, I did indeed have malaria again.
They should send hypochondriacs here for aversion therapy. Being ill has absolutely no attractions. You wait forever, clinics and hospitals are full of things you wish you hadn’t seen, and the medicine is strong enough to kill a horse.
There’s also the social side – as I was sitting waiting for the doctor, trying not to throw up, a man came and shook my hand, seeming to be the doctor. We talked, and it turned out he wasn’t, he was a random hospital employee who thought he would see if I wanted to marry him and take him to England, give him my phone number and be his email buddy. This happens here, on average, five to ten times a day, so one gets used to deflecting people. But this guy was persistent and loud, and it took four explanations that I was sick, I felt bad, and I didn’t want to go out with him, until he understood. Finally he believed me. Then he was offended. I lay down at this point and pretended to be dead.
So all in all, a bit of a day. Back to zero on the accident-free-days chart. This morning the kids here in the compound have ceased to make benign muppet noises and are intead banging saucepans as loud as they can outside my window, pretending to have a funeral. This too will end…
…which means ‘I’m resting.’
This has been a bit of a week. most of my stuff was taken on Tuesday as I went to the 4am bus (I just have no luck with the 4am bus at all), meaning I have to undergo a trial by electronics as I try to replace the necessary things. A whole team of people in England and Ghana are helping, and everyone here has been extremely nice, so the annoyance is being minimised.
The most annoying thing, in fact, has been reporting it to the police, who took all my remaining cash in return for making the report I needed for my insurance claim. I explained that when someone takes all your money, that means you don’t have money to bribe the police to report it, but the logic was beyond them.
So… I am here a few more days, still trying to get to Wa. I am starting to think that Wa is a cruel conspiracy to make foreigners run around like headless chickens. And I am wandering around Tamale, replacing the stuff that was taken. Looking for toiletries (I have the wrong skin, the wrong hair and the wrong taste to do this here, so it’s a challenge) all I can find is skin-whitening products, when in fact what I need is factor 50 sunblock. The skin-whitening industry is an odd one – women mix these products with steroid cream to thin the skin and then to whiten it, which as you can imagine, is not a great skincare regime in a place where they used to use sun exposure as a death penalty for recalcitrant slaves. And Nivea, which I used to think of as a nice, responsible brand, is one of the 15 types available. What is the world coming to?
So, m’fou khiah, in an effort to have a third accident-free day.
