Over the last year, Ghana has experienced a wave of anxiety about sakawa – internet fraud. The fraud has been going on much longer, but there is a noticeable uptick in the level of public hysteria at the moment. As with many worrying things in Ghana, it’s popularly attributed to Nigeria’s bad influence on ‘the youth’. Sakawa has a variety of meanings, ranging from defrauding people the old-fashioned way to online identity theft.
Principally, sakawa seems to manifest in Ghana at the moment in a less sophisticated version than the Nigerian ‘419’ scams (where people email you asking for your help accessing a billion-dollar inheritance and ask for your bank account details so they can share the money with you). Here, it is said to consist mainly of young men in internet cafes going on social networking sites like myspace and befriending older women in rich countries, or alternatively pretending to be young women and befriending older men.
Once they establish a relationship with someone online, the story goes, they either get the person to send them gifts by mail, or money by Western Union. This would seem mainly to involve criminal stupidity on the part of the sender. Who is actually responding to these requests? How bored/gullible must they be? And do they know they are responsible for a miasma of post-modern Ghanaian angst? However, where the fraud involves the recipient picking up funds (as reported in the paper last week) from Western Union using the aforesaid false online identity, it also involves actual fraud on the Ghanaian end, both on the part of the recipient and the Western Union employees who are said to accept their false identity documents for a share of the profits.
There’s also another version of sakawa where the defrauding party tries to get the credit card details of their mark, and uses them to order things for delivery to Ghana. There is even an urban myth that a child managed to get a BMW delivered to Tema port last year, and drove it away, but it’s hard to believe. Any time I try to use any of my bank cards to do anything here, including take money out of an ATM after calling repeatedly to warn the bank I’m about to do so, my account gets blocked. Credit cards are still almost unavailable in Ghana, so when they are used from here, the assumption is that it’s fraudulent and security measures are activated. Ordering objects on Amazon, for delivery to my address in England? Impossible from a Ghanaian IP address. The entire Amazon account shuts down automatically, and to add insult to injury they don’t even let you know they’ve done it for a week. So if these sakawa kids have figured out how to get credit cards to work online from Ghana, I want to know their secret.
Which leads us to the most interesting feature of sakawa – the strategies these kids use to make the fraud more likely to work. These involve practices prescribed by juju priests: the rumours say that the sakawa kid will go to the priest and he will say, ‘you must sleep for a night in a coffin, then sacrifice three chickens, then give me five cedis’. If the person does all this, their fraud will be successful. If not, they are disregarding the prescription of a juju priest, which, as everyone knows, is an unwise thing to do. It usually involves you getting turned into an animal of some kind, or running naked through the market square (a common feature of sakawa stories, along with the sleeping-in-a-coffin idea). There are also rumours about human sacrifices being made – but those are not sakawa-specific. It was rumoured politicians in marginal constituencies were making human sacrifices during the run-up to the last election.
In what seems like no time at all, sakawa has gone from a rumour to a full-fledged genre of urban myth here. The president has pronounced sakawa to be a danger to the nation’s reputation, the chief of police has announced that measures will be taken (according to café owners in Accra, both undercover and uniformed policemen are now frequenting their cafes to keep an eye out for people committing fraud) and everyone has a sakawa story.
It’s not that sakawa stories are necessarily untrue – in fact having looked at some browser histories in internet cafes, it’s clear that a significant proportion of people’s online activity involves looking up the profiles of American and European men and women in late middle age, and communicating with them. And most of the clients of internet cafes are young men and boys. So there is something going on, but this is no indication that it is a) succeeding or b) of a scale fit to generate this level of hysteria.
To test the level of rumour, I’ve started asking random people what they think sakawa is. They can all identify it, but people from the non-internet generations (roughly, anyone over 40 here) have only the haziest idea of what it is. They can identify that it happens on the internet, that it is a feature of the continuing degeneracy of ‘the youth’ and that it is an issue of national importance. But what it is, precisely, remains largely undefined.
Sakawa is thus becoming a catch-all term for crime, witchcraft and general dodginess. At a conference recently, the director of a child protection NGO told me that her friend’s daughter had ‘nearly been taken as a sacrifice for sakawa’. Apparently she was on her way to school and a man pulled her into a taxi, with two other young girls, and tried to drug them. The friend’s daughter escaped, but the other two were taken off to an unknown fate. How did your friend know it was for sakawa, I asked? Oh, of course it was for sakawa, she replied. What else would it be? I suggested a more mundane but equally criminal explanation, but she was not having any of it. This was juju, and juju it would stay.
Passing through Nkrumah Circle on Friday, I saw a crowd peering in fascination at something in a corner. I stopped, thinking it must be either the football or some dying animal. It turned out to be a poster about sakawa. Posters are one way of marking cultural milestones here. If something is important, there is often a poster about it on sale. Footballers’ new cars, footballers’ new houses, and Obama’s visit have been recent poster topics. And now sakawa. So here are the bits of the poster that don’t involve beheadings or nudity:
So there you have it. Don’t do juju and try to buy a car online, or you will end up turning into a beagle. Don’t say you weren’t warned.
Filed under: Accra, July | Tags: Accra, connectivity, internet cafe, Research, vodafone
I am around Accra this week, surveying (conveniently) the internet cafes in my own neighbourhood, Kokomlemle.
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So far, I have interviewed 13. There should be 17 or so in all. Then on to Adabraka, across the Ring Road.
As I start to talk to small business owners in Accra, it’s evident there are some big differences from the north. First, there are female-owned cafes here. 3 women so far, which is radical compared to none of the 67 up north. Also, people are making a slightly better living from the cafes here in the city. However, when asked what they need to succeed, all of them say connectivity. ‘The link’ (i.e. the internet connection from the only provider they can afford, Vodafone, formerly Ghana Telecom) is so unreliable it’s impossible to run an internet business.
This is interesting – the same criticism has come from every cafe owner surveyed so far. No one knows what is going on with ‘the link’, why it is so bad, why the company offers no compensation unless it goes down for two weeks consecutively (which, amazingly, has actually happened in the last couple of months). It’s down about 3 days a week on average, which means that people don’t even try to come to the cafes to browse unless they have to. Meanwhile, Vodafone charges the internet cafe owners for the connection as if it were working. If there were any alternative provider, every single cafe owner I have talked to vows they would switch instantly. The network sometimes has surges that fry people’s modems, for which the company does not compensate them. Each time the link goes down locally, the owners have to call Vodafone to come and fix it. But the technicians often won’t come out unless they are personal friends of the owners. So those who don’t have a buddy in the company have to bribe them instead. Which makes the bad service a big earner for individual technicians, and probably does not incentivise them to let management know that the customers are ready to mutiny.
So what is going on? How can you provide such terrible service and still stay in business? I consulted with a friend who works in telecoms here, and he came up with some suggestions.
The real answer, of course, is that there is no one else. The national provider set up all the country’s existing landline phone service, and thus owns the network infrastructure that delivers the DSL service everyone uses for broadband. It also controls access to the Sat3 submarine cable off the coast of West Africa. So it has a stranglehold on the market.
The company has also, in its previous incarnation as Ghana Telecom (bought by Vodafone last year amid an ongoing torrent of outrage and investigation from various political factions) set up a profoundly dysfunctional system for internet service provision. As my friend explains it, IP addresses (the numbers that identify users’ locations) were set up originally as open ports, meaning that they allowed, in principle, unlimited amounts of spam and virus-laden traffic. Certain global firewall systems have been set up to combat spam, since it slows down companies’ and even whole countries’ networks. One example is SORBS (see link below)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_and_Open_Relay_Blocking_System
The way these blocking mechanisms work is by identifying the IP addresses that send mass emails, and blocking them. And since the IP addresses created by Ghana Telecom are all similar, these blocking mechanisms don’t distinguish between different locations within the country, so that the whole country shows up as one big spam-generation site.
Among other issues, this makes browsing sites outside Ghana as slow as mud, and means that emails from here to any official address outside the country will be bounced back as spam. For instance, I can’t email any administrative address at my university (Sussex) from here, nor can I access the electronic journals I need in order to study. My Amazon account keeps getting closed whenever I try to order anything from here (four times at the last count), and when I try to use a credit card online I either find my account blocked for fraud or I have to go through byzantine security procedures, using passwords I have inevitably forgotten.
So the upshot of all this is that ‘the link goes down’ because Ghana is spamming on a global scale. Over the three years or so since Ghana Telecom started offering general broadband service to major towns, the speed of broadband here has gone from quite good to a snail’s pace (it can take half an hour to download an email), all because of spam clogging the system. This may be the only situation where the internet gets slower and more expensive over time – Ghana is going in the opposite direction to the rest of the world.
The solution? Until someone devises a way to stop people spamming, the only response is to get Ghana’s internet addresses de-blacklisted internationally. This means Vodafone needs to invest in its network and re-register its IP ports with firewalls that will catch the spam and clean things up. The government, according to the industry, is not going to award any new contracts to ISPs until this situation improves, because more companies providing service on the same bad network would only clog things up further. So for the small enterprises of the tech sector, the future looks bleak unless Vodafone can get its act together.
So they have to wait, some more patiently than others, while customers fall asleep waiting for their email to download. The only benefit is that owners, since they can’t do their jobs most of the time, have a lot of spare time to talk to passing researchers.
Back in Accra after a week’s break to get over the malaria (again), and finally ready to get back on the job. Auntie was happy to see me – Hannah had been away too, researching in the Volta region, and the house had been too empty.
I am now able to walk around, which is nice after two months of just wanting to go back to bed every day. I can also more or less think – which may not be a good thing. I started looking at my data from the North this week, and did some elementary analysis, cross-referencing the various factors I’d been looking at to see what determined whether someone would have a successful business or not. It turns out that the factors that decide whether you will be successful at running an internet cafe in Northern Ghana are:
wait for it…
nothing.
Absolutely nothing, as it turns out. There is no factor that clearly divides successful from unsuccessful (unprofitable) cafes. This was a significant hiccup. For a while I wandered around the house, made a cup of tea, thought about getting some cheese for dinner, considered banging my head against the wall. Then I went back and looked at my notes again, and had an inkling of what might be going on. There is something there, but it’s complicated.
Luckily I had written a note to myself some weeks ago, in a momentary burst of clarity, about what I should look for when I had all the data together. So I re-crunched the data using that idea, and found something. What it was is classified – trust me, if it turns out to be usable you will hear about it ad nauseam, and will remember fondly these days of not knowing.
In other news, Obama is coming to town, and Accra is excited. In fact, everyone is excited, but only people in Accra have any risk of actually seeing him. There are billboards from companies welcoming him, he’s on the news, everyone is hoping he will stop by. We discussed with Auntie tempting him over with home fries and mystery stew, but thought it might disrupt his schedule. We’d hate to be responsible for him missing some official event.
In the meantime, my penguin and travelling companion, Niccolo, is getting excited too. He has had his image turned into the classic Obama poster as a small tribute:
niccolobama
He hopes Obama will appreciate the thought. Fish are important. Teach a man to fish, etc…
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.
Filed under: March, The North | Tags: Ghana, GPRS, internet cafe, Mognori, Mole
Up at 3 to catch the early bus to Wa, which stops at Damongo. In Damongo there is a new internet café run by a guy called Prince, who set it up after winning a business plan competition run by Google.org and Technoserve, two fairly major international organisations. The café is in Damongo’s market square, along with the bus station, so when you get off the bus after two hours of road that’s so bad your entire body continues to vibrate for hours, the first thing you see is a huge sign for an internet café. It all feels a bit postmodern. Then you go inside, and it’s less so. There are huge incentives to start up cafes in remote locations these days, since there are international grants available and the government offers a ten-year tax holiday to anyone doing so.
However, there appear to be three factors involved in starting one – first a sense that it’s a business proposition, i.e. someone will actually be literate enough to use it; second, that it’s a benefit to the community, and third, that you know how to use computers, and have some elementary knowledge of how to network and configure them. I have met a very few people with all three, but mainly it’s the first two. I’ve had a café owner ask me if I knew how to make something appear on the internet, and have had several tell me that they started their businesses with no knowledge of computers at all.
The best story I heard was from Hannah, who attended a college-level computer class when she was living here a few years ago. A student asked the teacher whether computers could catch viruses from people. The teacher’s response was, “I haven’t heard of it happening, but I wouldn’t rule it out.”
Bizarrely, Google and Technoserve didn’t check whether there was any technical knowledge at play when they made this grant, so the poor guy is pretty much on his own. At the beginning a Peace Corps volunteer arrived to use the café, found only one computer was connected to a server, and generously networked the place for them. Since then, no help of any kind. On from Damongo to Mole National Park, where I had heard the Mole Motel, the only hotel in the park, had a new internet café. I arrived to find it had already been shut down, three months after starting up, because the owner was disappointed with the returns. Apparently he had bought 20 computers and a single GPRS modem (which runs at 480kbps, i.e. the speed dial-up was running in England in the early 1990’s, when you had to wait five minutes for your Hotmail account to load), and was attempting to sell internet time to tourists who wanted to upload photos. Needless to say, the customers were not impressed. As I speak, my own GPRS modem has been trying to load my gmail account page for the last 37 minutes, at a speed that I am coming to accept as standard. And this is at 4am, when the signal is strongest. So as a plan for providing a commercial service, this was not the smartest. The place is currently shut, pending the owner’s run for the District Assembly, but the manager, Salisu, is smarter. He’s 18 years old, with less than a high school education, and grew up in a village that gets entirely cut off for three months when it rains, but he has figured out how to use and network computers, and is trying to reform the place and get it a satellite connection so people can use it for other things than an exercise in zen.
(An update: after 45 minutes of asking me whether I’m sure that “google.com” really exists and that I have typed it correctly, my browser has now loaded a blank page and proudly says ‘done’. )
Mole National Park is beautiful. The guesthouse is set on an escarpment above a waterhole where, as I arrived, elephants were drinking. There are eagles, baboons by the pool, (a pool, which is also quite impressive, although the water is so murky you can’t see the bottom, which is good because there are things down there), and families of warthogs wandering around the restaurant. One of the girls staying here and I asked the receptionist if we could do something local in the afternoon, and he and his cousin took us down to Mognori, a village 7 miles away, on their motorbikes. Give a young Ghanaian a dirtbike, he’ll speed.
me and Daniel on the way to Mognori
Give him a girl to sit on the back, he’ll go so fast you convert to Islam. But we got there safely, covered in red dust.
Mognori designs
The village was remarkable – in this part of the Northern region, the living compounds get more Sahelian, with square houses whose walls are intricately decorated by the women who live there. They are also organised as an eco-tourism area, so you can take canoe trips upriver with the local fishermen.
fulani kids in mognori
There are a lot of Fulani living around Northern Ghana – originally from Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, they are cattle herders by trade and when Ghanaian farmers buy cattle, they hire Fulani to look after them. So the Fulani end up living permanently where they are hired. They also know how to make really nice cattle pens from thorn trees.
Charles Kwame Layaman
We went out in a canoe paddled by Charles Kwame Layaman, who gives his name very proudly when asked. I can see why, it sounds impressive. It was very quiet and cool down on the river, the water was high from a recent rain, hiding all the crocodiles.
larabanga mosque
Then we went to Larabanga, where they have the oldest mosque in Ghana (purportedly). Our guide claimed it was built in the 1460’s, but the books say it’s most likely mid-17th century. Larabanga is a tough place – it’s very poor, and very close to tourism because of its mosque and the nearness of the park. There’s a lot of scamming from tourists, a lot of poaching from the park, and the chief isn’t getting his people organised to try the eco-tourism option like Mognori, the other village. It reminded me of Brooklyn, where the proximity of the rich and the poor make for some very bad relationships. But the mosque is really beautiful, especially at sunset when the kids have been throwing balls on the roof and climbing all over it to get them back.
mosque door
Off to Bimbila, again starting out at 4am, which is imperative if you want to get anywhere. Missed the first bus to Yendi, which bizzarrely left an hour early at 4.30, and had to wait till 7 for the second. Then found the next bus to Bimbilla, which turned out not to be a bus but a farm truck. Farm supplies, with people and luggage on top. They wouldn’t let me get in the back with everyone else, apparently due to my whiteness, which I think translates as my ability to pay double to sit in the cab with the driver. This gave me the opportunity to meet Suli, a yam farmer who instantly proposed that I should come to his village and marry him because he worked hard and if I married a guy with lots of yams, I would never go hungry. He has a couple of wives already, but apparently he can keep all of us in yams. I declined politely, but I think he’s still expecting me on market day.
the truck
The truck takes along its own mechanics, who almost outnumber the passengers. The road, generously described as ‘rough’ by the truck’s owner who sold me the ticket, rattled the truck so hard it was difficult to remember to breathe. Then there was a tornado (no idea why, but a tornado about the width of the road). If you have to meet a tornado, do so in a large farm truck with about 50 people packed in the back. It could have been a nuclear blast, we weren’t going anywhere. The red dust, though, when kicked up by a tornado, has to be experienced to be believed.
Then there was the guy who flagged us down wanting to put his cow on board. All the mechanics jumped off to help him get it in the back. The cow wasn’t convinced, but got on anyway. Suli smiled at me and drew his finger across his throat. ‘Bimbilla’, he said. I took it the journey wasn’t going to end well for the cow.
the unwilling cow
Bimbilla, at 12 noon. Walked around to find the internet cafe, then into town to find a stationer’s to interview (comparison group for the study), then to the bus, then a two-hour wait for the bus to go. Hotter than can possibly be imagined. Got a good Dagbani (local language) lesson from the old guys at the bus station though. It’s one of those languages that varies according to who is teaching it to you, since local dialects abound. I draw blank stares when I try out the Dagbani I know, but some of the basic stuff works and I’m building on that. Moru Babatu and his posse mainly taught me to say things about being English, which didn’t seem the most useful phrases, but you have to take what you can get.
- Moru Babatu and the Dagbani teachers
Most conversations involve me saying something in Dagbani, and the person saying ‘yes white, now give me your number and your address so I can come and visit you in England.’ I think I need to learn how to say semi-rude things in Dagbani next. ‘White’ is my name here, or Selmina, which means white. I prefer Selmina, it takes a moment to process and so is less of a shock. Getting yelled ‘white!’ at by every second person is something to be believed. By the end of the day, I was so hungover from heat and dust that I started to ignore people who yelled ‘white’ at me, and they were genuinely offended. It’s like people at primary school telling you you have big feet or freckles, you’re supposed to have a response.
There are ghosts here, too. Coming back on the night bus from Yendi, because today just took forever, I watched the stars through the open window, smelled the sweet nighttime smell of the savannah and the smoke from people’s fires along the road, listened to Tinariwen in the darkened bus, and watched the lightning a hundred miles away to the south. The road I travelled today, all seven hours of it, was part of the old slave route to the coast.
the old slave route
You can still hear the Arabic of the slave traders resonating in modern Dagbani (ask me to speak some when I get back and you’ll think it’s Arabic), and see the baobab trees that they used to tether the slaves to in the village markets along the road. The slaves were Ghanaians and Burkinabe from this area and just north of here, where the communities are smaller and people had a harder time getting together to defend themselves. The traders were Arabs, following the same route used for all the merchandise they traded across Africa. Knowledge and ideas came this way too, with the merchants – Muslim scholars and Islam itself arrived on this road. The main slave market was at Salaga: I go there next week.
Today the route is peopled with fairly happy, though very poor, villages. People are hanging out (it’s the hanging out season – mangoes and no rain yet), kids are in school, things are chugging along. These kids followed me for about a mile in the midday sun, instead of going home for lunch. They came into the internet cafe and the 20-something guys watching pirated Angelina Jolie movies shooed them out. I should have taken them on as research assistants, they were great.
Bimbilla girls
I am done with the intense travelling for a few days. The last week has left me feeling like a wet rag. It’s been a beautiful, unspeakably exhausting one, and if I do any more I will get sick, so I’m going to ride a motorbike around Tamale and work here until Monday.
Filed under: March, The North | Tags: internet cafe, Nalerigu, Saboba, tamale
The last two days, with Tamale interviews nearly done, I have been on the road. And off the road, on dirt tracks. And off the dirt tracks, hiking around the bush way, way off the map. It’s been interesting. Useful things I have discovered are that in Northern Ghana, you can drink 8 pints of water in a day and not need to pee. Also, that most of the backroad buses here have no brakes – they just change down through the gears then use the handbrake, where there is one. And hope no cattle cross the road.
So, yesterday I took the 5am bus from Tamale north to Walewale, where I met a great IT teacher called Gerard who has a smart board (electronic blackboard) and about 30 computers, and provides connectivity to the whole community. CISCO funded the computer lab with NEPAD and the Ghanaian government for the first year, donated the hardware and a satellite connection, then shut them down at the end of twelve months (way to wind down an intervention sustainably, NEPAD!). So now he has to figure out how to get it reconnected and make it cover its own costs. Very cool guy though, I hope he succeeds. Hitched a ride on his motorbike down to the bus station, then east out to Gambaga and Nalerigu, about a hundred miles away, where the transport ends. A guy called Aboyinga has set up an internet cafe here with the best connection I have found yet in Ghana (no one else is competing for connectivity that far out). In Nalerigu, I was finally able to back up my data by sending it to my email account. Getting there took 6 hours, coming back only 3 because somehow I got a direct bus from outside the internet cafe.
compound near Gambaga
People out here live in scattered savannah villages, in compounds with huts made of mud brick and thatch. Pretty much all the families out here are subsistence farmers, and it’s rough trying to scrape a living. It’s dry, there’s only one growing season a year, unlike down south where there are two. So people are about to go through their hungry season, which will end around June with the rains. Everyone is tired of the heat, they don’t want to do anything or go anywhere. I agree. But mangoes are in season, so not everything is bad.
mangoes are finally in season
Made it back to Tamale last night at 6, ate something and was asleep by 8. The heat during the day is so intense (it gets up to around 110 degrees, in the high 40s) that it just tires you out. Today I got up around 4 again, with the temperature only in the mid 30s, and took the bus out to Yendi. I had spent a while yesterday deliberating about how to stay the night where I was and get a bus to Yendi from there, it’s about 100 miles south, but it turns out you have to go through Tamale so all my debating was wasted.
Yendi has an internet cafe, but when I called the owner, Kombat (great name – maybe he’s from Brooklyn) he was in Tamale so we agreed to meet there at the end of the week instead. I have to go to all the cafes anyway, to mark them with GPS for the map I’m going to make, so it wasn’t a wasted trip. Then on to Saboba, on the border with Togo. Two hours on non-roads, where the red dust works its way into your hair, your clothes, your ears, anything that’s not zipped up, and never comes out again.
Saboba has internet, but it’s nonprofit and run by Worldvision, and therefore not eligible for my project. However, I got an interesting interview with the guy who runs the service there, and he told me the other towns where they operate, and where there is no other service, which saved me a day’s travel at least. So it was worth it. Then I discovered that there is only one bus a day out of Saboba, and it goes at 9am. Cecilia, who I had met on the bus in, had called her husband Thomas who kindly gave me a ride on his motorbike out to the internet cafe. When I got back and was stranded, they started calling people to see if anyone could give me a ride. Thomas apologised for not giving me a lift back to Yendi himself, but said he had typhoid and was still recuperating. It turns out Cecilia had had it too, as had their little son. As I mentioned, it’s tough for the people here. So I agreed with him that he should probably stay home. He kept calling though, until he found a student of his from the local high school, George, who was going to Yendi that afternoon. So I hitched a ride with him. In a skirt. At noon. My legs are a lovely shade of English red, but I made it back to Yendi in the end. Then an hour’s wait on the bus in Yendi until it was full (drank 3 pints of water during that one) and a ride back to Tamale with the hottest people in Ghana, who had also spent the day travelling around, doing business, and were as exhausted and dehydrated as me. But at least I’m not in Togo.
Thomas and Cecilia, guardian angels
Things I learned today:
1. You can’t get there from here. Do not attempt to do anything clever involving a map – 50% of the roads it shows don’t exist. Go to the biggest town you can find, and take the bus from there, even if it’s a hundred miles out of your way. Literally.
2. Get takeout breakfast if you are in a hurry, but don’t get the tea to go. You will end up in a trotro on a pitted dirt road with a plastic bag of boiling liquid which you are expected to suck out after biting a hole in it. It’s lucky my computer case is waterproof and Ghanaians are very tolerant of spills.
3. All informal bus services are the same, everywhere. The fights here about where to stop and whether you can bring your chickens/bike/massive tub of semi-preserved fish are the same as the fights on the Chinatown bus to Boston. And someone always has the wrong ticket and won’t admit it. The only answer is an ipod turned up really loud.
on the road
Yesterday there was a ‘lights out’ – our power went off at 7pm, then the next morning a planned outage happened (maintenance? religious tradition? no one knows), so although the rest of Tamale was only out for six hours, our neighbourhood was out for nearly 24. Fortunately my computer was more or less charged, so I was able to work. When I ran yesterday morning, the only building in the neighbourhood with power was the power station. Bastards.
I have been running all week, at 5.15am. This means I start by moonlight and finish just before dawn, when it gets too hot. The bats are just finishing the night shift and the birds taking over as I get back to the guesthouse. Goats are asleep on the tables at the side of the road, and a man studies every morning on the kerb in the fluorescent light from a shop. People are baffled to see a woman running, but there are athletes who train before dawn, and they say hi as they pass.
I spent all day yesterday with Latif, a temporary research assistant while I am in Tamale. He’s a young guy in college who runs an internet cafe, and since all the owners know each other he has been able to take me to the ones I would never find on my own. Some are down back alleys on dirt roads, almost outside town. There must be an optimal distance between them, like Starbucks branches, depending on the area’s features – literacy or age profile – since in the centre of town there will be two on the same block, but out where I was yesterday they are few and far between. I got 8 interviews in a day with Latif’s help, doubling my previous average. Most of them were really out of the way, like this one:
at neattech internet cafe, Tamale
We ended the afternoon by investigating Savalugu, a district capital about 20 miles from Tamale to the north. Latif had heard there was a cafe there, and I need to visit each district capital to check, even if there isn’t likely to be one. When we got there, we found that there had indeed been one, but it had just closed down last month.
Riding a motorbike across the savannah is amazing – like being cooked in a very picturesque fan oven. It’s easily 110 degrees out there, so that even at 80 mph it doesn’t cool you off because the hot air is just forcing itself into your lungs at greater speed. Also, this was a small bike and the back seat was just a metal carrier, so it’s not the kind of thing you can do every day if you want to be able to walk around. For one day, though, it’s quite an effective strategy.
On the way out of town we passed a procession where a whole village was taking their chief in a palanquin to make a sacrifice. There was a junior chiefly person too, but he got a donkey instead of a palanquin, and a guy with a nice golfing umbrella to keep him cool.
Dagomba chief
Dagomba junior chief
Anyway, man kun meh, na on die so ho (I’m off now, have a good day).
I am considering adding ‘percentage body fat’ into my survey questions, since it seems a quite reliable indicator of business sustainability here. Today I met the guy who until recently had a monopoly on all the district’s school registrations at his internet cafe. He was easily the size of all the other cafe owners put together. The average cafe so far seems to run on such a narrow profit margin that a couple of bad months can shut it down, so it’s a cutthroat business. I also met the cafe owner responsible for starting the ‘no browsing pornography’ rule in all the cafes here. He used to run 5 cafes, but the consumers here are mainly young men under 24, and he found that gradually most of his business consisted of them browsing porn. His business got a rep among local primary school boys as a place to go to see other people doing this, so he banned the activity altogether, and lost 60% of his clientele, along with his means of paying back the $50,000 bank loan he had taken out at 30% interest to finance the business. Luckily he has other ventures – as I was talking to him, at 4.30 on a Friday, the managers of the other enterprises were coming to him with wads of cash from the week. This is standard here – constantly changing regulations, the cost of capital and dodgy governance means you need to diversify to survive, so the people I’m interviewing run up to five or so businesses at a time, often involving consulting, contracting, an internet cafe, sometimes a farm, and work as a teacher. I’d be exhausted.
Time was always meaningless, but today space started to be as well. A guy I was chasing to interview was, according to our repeated conversations by cellphone, at the polytechnic outside Tamale, at his internet cafe in the centre of town, at his other business a kilometre away, and at the mosque in a different part of town. (It has taken me all Friday to discover that ‘mosque’ is not a collection of consonants that people here can pronounce – I got blank stares until I found out it was pronounced ‘moks’ instead. like ‘ask’ in Brooklyn, which is ‘ax’.)
I’m having some trouble with the fact that they redenominated the currency here in 2007 snd people still haven’t got their heads around it. When you ask how much a business makes, you may get an answer in the millions, the hundreds, or dollars, and they may all mean roughly the same thing. Then there are the people whose aritmetic skills have just been addled by the change in currency, and who have lost their ability to handle numbers altogether. Unfortunately, this group includes many of the businesspeople I am dealing with. They will give an answer about their revenue or expenditure that is so far off the mark that I just keep asking them in different ways to try to get to the real figure, but they just pick a number and stick to it resolutely, even if it is clearly a thousand cedis or more off the mark. As we say in musical theatre: ‘sing it loud, sing it wrong.’
The weekend looms. I am meeting my temporary research assistant tomorrow at 7am to start finding the cafes on the outskirts of town. Hopefully I’ll be able to finish Tamale by Monday, then start making trips to the outlying districts. I hear there’s a swimming pool in town, and am hoping to get sidetracked by that if there is time on Sunday.
Four cafes surveyed yesterday, three so far today. I am writing this from the fourth. All very small businesses – under 10 employees. They pop up and disappear a lot in Tamale, people tell me, mainly because the internet business looks like a good opportunity but the population is not that literate here yet (about 30%) so that finding clients is tough. The goverment has given the sector a kick in the pants by decreeing that all school registrations for middle and secondary school must be done online – but in this region the local controller started off by contracting with a single internet cafe (at 7 cedis a child, because most people didn’t know how to use the internet and thus had to use ‘secretarial services’ from the cafe as well), which made a ton of money and had queues day and night of children lining up to register. Children from outside Tamale were coming to town and sleeping outside the cafe in question for two nights in the queue. Finally the other cafe owners got together and protested, and the monopoly was ended. But it must still be difficult to register your kid for school if you live far away from an internet cafe.
Most of the cafes I’ve surveyed so far are very small – 3 employees or so. They are entrepreneurial but highly precarious, as the margins are small, equipment and broadband are expensive, and most of the business (apart from school registrations) depends on attracting the 20% or so of the region who are literate. Here is Hannah, who set up a business with her brother this January:
Hannah at her cafe
She barely breaks even, and needs a loan to get more computers and expand the business. But credit here, even the formal kind, starts at around 30% interest, so she is unlikely to be able to get any.
It is going to be tough doing the census work. There’s always a long hike between businesses, and sometimes people send you in the wrong direction just because internet cafes pop up and disappear so fast, they may remember using one a few months ago but it no longer exists. Meanwhile I have walked a mile or so in 100 degrees. It’s hot by 7am here – I stood waiting for my morning ride into town today, and noticed that my skin actually hurt where the sun was falling on it. Perhaps a burqa is the way to go…
And the whacking continues. A friend here tells me that primary school kids are beaten if their parents fail to pay their school fees on time. A guy came up to me in the street yesterday wanting to have the standard conversation about where I am from, what I am doing here, and what my phone number is, and when we can go out together, and because I had just walked two miles in a hundred degrees and done four interviews, I was not in the mood so I just politely told him I was busy. Who would want to chat me up looking as I do after I’ve walked two miles in 100 degrees of heat is another matter – it indicates that it’s less about my personal charm and beauty, and more about my being the equivalent of a walking ATM. Unfortunately this made him feel as if his manly reputation was at stake, since he had chosen to chat me up in the street in front of everybody, so when I refused to talk he picked up a stick and started beating the nearest girl selling water (the bottom of the mercantile pecking order here). She just moved on as if it were normal, and everyone went about their business.
Despite all the everyday irritations, when you stop moving for a moment there are consolations. There are hummingbirds that look as if they’re made of cobalt, and pink, white and yellow bougainvillea everywhere. The earth is red, and mostly dust since it’s the dry season. The older houses are either colonial or round huts made of mud and brick, arranged in groups with walls running between them and little alleyways where people sit and do laundry, sew, and talk. It’s beautiful, in a spare, sun-baked way.
blue house, tamale
houses in tamale
so, onward and upward.
