Filed under: Accra, March | Tags: Ghana, internet cafe, migration, Northern Region
Still making contact with the people I need to know to do my larger business research studies. Today was very productive, and unbelievably hot. First I went down for a meeting in Legon at the university with the head of the migration studies centre. She was very helpful with advice about researching in the northern region. Apparently there is a part of it that is so inaccessible, and even more so when the rains come, that it is referred to by Ghanaians as ‘overseas’. Apparently a lot of people just move out in advance of the rains because they know if anything happens, no one will be able to get to them until the season is over. She also told me that, contrary to what others have been telling me, this is considered the perfect time to do survey work in the north. Apparently they do their censuses here in March/April, because people are all home in their villages.
I had got the seasons wrong – there’s a ‘famine’ season just before the rains, when the stored food has run out and people have to leave to find work so they can eat. So lots of people are missing from their villages then. I had thought it was around now, but it turns out the south has two famine seasons, march/april and september, each followed by a rain, whereas the north just has the one. So in my ignorance, I have chosen a good time to work.
Mariama, the head of the migration centre, also advised me there was nothing more recent than the 2000 census to tell me about the towns I would be researching, so I had to go get it. In most places, the census is either free online or at least can be bought on a CD Rom. The Ghana Statistical Office is a Dickensian nightmare. It’s piled up to the ceiling with statistical publications that are mainly from the 80′s, with two (very nice) men sitting in the middle of it watching chatshows at full volume on a tv with bad reception. Together we managed to dig out a copy of the census, which turned out to cost nearly $50, and weigh slightly more than I did. I lugged it back to Kokolemle and had to take a shower to celebrate.
I have had several competing opinions from people on what I will find in terms of internet cafes when I do this survey. Several have said I will be lucky to find any in the north, while others have muttered darkly that my study is ‘ambitious’, which is academic for ‘you have no idea what you are getting into, and next year they will find your bones bleaching in the sun’. I’m hoping the truth is somewhere between the two, although it’s possible that both may be true.
I piloted my SME questionnaire today, which I expected to be a bit of a mess but which actually went very well. Bizarrely, it confirmed my main hypothesis, which is that internet cafes depend on international networks. The manager I interviewed had not migrated, but it turned out she was leasing it from a guy who went to England, earned some money and set up a business back home, and is now back in London. So bingo. Pity this one isn’t part of the study, since it’s only a pilot. It would be a huge irony if the same result didn’t turn up again in the other hundred or so interviews I’m about to start.
In other news, I had a meeting today at an IT company that was exactly like SPECTRE’s headquarters in the Bond movies. All dark echoing marble and a spiral stair that leads somewhere mysterious. And receptionists who smile menacingly at visitors. I expected the CEO to be stroking a white cat, but alas, no. I also found Boo Radley’s house, but the connection is too slow to upload photos today so that will have to wait for another time.
On my way back I wandered inadvertently into an area of town where the streets actually have names and the houses have numbers. They also have barbed wire, dogs and security guards. I hadn’t realised Accra had one of these bits, but every city does somewhere so I guess it was only a matter of time. It was a contrast with my neighbourhood, where people’s doors don’t lock and the only security is provided by fierce, ancient, topless ladies who cook outside so they can keep an eye on what’s going on in the neighbourhood. I think I prefer mine.
Hannah and I went out last night with Kwabena, Auntie’s nephew, to Bywell, a place in Osu that has a band on Thursdays. It was like going back in time – classic bebop with African drums mixed in, and Sinatra tunes. It was all very well-mannered and suave, in a slightly tatty kind of way, as if everyone had been caught in a loop since the 1950s and only the decor had aged. Great place.
Just one of the reasons that studying the Northern Region is going to be fun is that it’s entailed a lot of defining what I am researching. There have been three main challenges in this area.
1. a definition of an internet café. Perhaps surprisingly, it’s not one based on having a connection to the internet.
2. what kind of online activities I am interested in looking at. The revelation that people occasionally use the internet to look at pornography (80% of internet data traffic at the last count) is very useful the first time, less so the second, and loses its easy charm when the fifteenth person has the same revelation and wants to talk about it while I’m trying to present my plan. Such people need to get out more.
3. a technology-based business – if I include mobile phones, an obvious candidate, I will be here until I am 80.
So I’ve pinned down the ‘what’. But now the ‘where’ is getting away from me. I had picked the Northern Region, which when you look at most maps of Ghana (which are, to say the least, lacking in detail), it looks like a nice big chunk of savannah, north of the Volta and south of the slightly dodgy tribal regions on the Burkina border where you have to fill out a new risk assessment form for the university.
However.
Hannah found a map of the country’s districts today, which is more detailed than the regional and road maps we have been looking at so far. It disagrees with the other maps about where the Northern Region begins and ends, where the border crossings are with Togo and Cote d’Ivoire, and other fairly important things like the whereabouts of the Volta river, which you’d think even quite a dull cartographer would be able to pin down. Then I started to see that the other maps (3 so far) also disagree with each other, and all the cartographers disagree with the guidebook, which I will be using to actually get from one place to another since it contains the salient information on transport. The guidebook is clearly based on an earlier, more definitive map, possibly the one Borges (see below) wrote of, which has since ceased to exist. Apparently there is a government survey office somewhere in Accra from which one can buy more maps, but I’m starting to think I don’t want any more opinions.
I think the best plan may be, each time I reach a doubtful area, to ask people, ‘do you live in the Northern Region?’ As long as they don’t know any cartographers (and clearly none have been to the region lately) their opinion will be good enough for me. The ‘people’s map of Ghana’ continues.
I heard recently on QI that when the British were making the first detailed maps of Ghana back in the 1800s, one facetious junior draughtsman turned some of the contour lines into an elephant, assuming no one would notice. I think there may be some secret association of Ghanaian cartographers in which the task of toying with honest travellers has been passed on, like the secret of the Grail, from generation to generation.
Anyway, here is the Borges story. It’s short:
On Exactitude in Science . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers’ Guild struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map, inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
Wandering around Accra, finding my bearings again. It’s no less confusing than last time, still no street names, but this time I have more of a general sense of where I am and what’s going on, and I hope I get lost with better grace. Hannah (my friend from Sussex) helps too, since she lived here for a couple of years a while ago. Most importantly, she’s teaching me which food is vegetarian, something that’s surprisingly hard to figure out and which caused me no end of problems last time. We had lunch at a rooftop place in Usshertown called “Back Pass”, which despite the dodgy name was both good and shady.
Ghana is all about Obama at the moment. t-shirts, bars:
the obama inn, kokomlemle
Hannah and I are creating our own map of Accra, since there are no decent ones. We’re taking pictures of salient places, then will GIS them onto a google earth map when we get back. It’s very subjective cartography (note for Ilse – psychogeography) but hopefully will be better than the current map, which shows about a quarter of the roads and offers frequent misdirection when you are searching for important places. If we can post it on the web one day, perhaps it will help future visitors not get quite as lost as we have.
After walking around in the heat for four hours or so, we had lost about half our bodyweight so we went to Osu and ate massive amounts of ice cream in Frankie’s, a Lebanese place with air conditioning. Then we found we were completely high on sugar and AC, and all we could do was wander around looking at things beatifically. Finally we sobered up and came back to Auntie’s, where we’re staying. It’s in Kokomomle, which for anyone who has been here is just north of the ring road, near Circle and Busy.
In the evening, we went out with the other people staying here for fish and chips at a new place nearby. It’s always a trip going out in the evening, because it’s completely dark (no street lights) and everyone in town is out walking around, cooking things, and hanging out. Kids playing, people socialising, no one apparently able to see a thing. We walked past a sign for a chop bar – ‘Don’t mind your wife chop’. But there was no one there. So I guess wives aren’t so unpopular after all.
There’s a wonderful backwards thing with cutlery here – when you order dinner, cutlery only comes with certain things. So you get a whole roast fish, on the bone, covered in vegetables and doused in pepper sauce, and banku (maize dough), with no cutlery at all. But if you order chips, you get a knife, fork and napkin. So you eat the main dish with your fingers, then wash your hands in a bowl, pick up your cutlery, and eat chips. Odd, but it works.
The restaurant was showing movies with no sound, first Blood Diamond then Grand Canyon, which was an odd mixture. First, West African war and destruction with happy boy band restaurant music playing in the background, then Kevin Kline getting robbed and menaced in LA by African Americans with happy girl band restaurant music in the background. Both were pretty odd to watch in Accra, where people still use well-bred English words like ‘palaver’ and even the refugees read the Economist.
The essence of Accra at the moment, for me, is conveyed by the MTN office. It’s one of the two main mobile providers in Ghana, and has a very posh place downtown, where you go to top up your phone. It’s a Ghanaian company, ordinary Ghanaians use it, it’s great. However, people are not used to posh yet. So when you have a nice office with lots of glass, you still have to warn people so they don’t walk into it.
To be fair, I had a lovely boss at Rockefeller who used to walk into the glass at reception and nearly knock himself out, quite regularly. We had to get a plant put there.
I have been talking with friends a lot recently about the paradoxes involved in ‘development’ and NGOs in Africa. What do the endless projects and inputs and outputs actually amount to, and how much does it help that it’s foreigners who have all the money and the power? Ghana is an interesting case because it’s a peaceful country (mostly) where private enterprise is booming, and the street signs for the development NGOs and projects all compete and mingle with the commercial activity. This won’t be so true as I go further north this month, but it’s what I’m studying – the transition from Development (international-aid-driven) to development (whatever the country does on its own). I reflected that the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) industry, which is huge, is actually a system devised to mitigate the fact that those who fund and implement development projects actually have no personal stake in what is going on. They may feel strongly about the success of their interventions, but still, if it doesn’t work out, they can do something else. And if they really make a mess and people start shooting at them, they can get on a helicopter and leave. The real M&E is done by people who live or die by the results – farmers, checking whether their crops are growing or dying, sellers in markets checking whether people still want to buy what they are selling. M&E is a way of filtering altruism, of making sure there is some reality in the mix. But how can it take the place of an actual personal stake in what is going on?
