As I continue my survey of internet cafes here in Accra, one question keeps recurring. How can these small businesses survive, let along turn a profit? 15 so far in Kokomlemle and 11 in Adabraka, the two areas of Accra I am focusing on, and barely one is making its owner a living. Yet they provide an essential service for all the businesses in the area, since an internet connection costs a minimum of 90 cedis (about US$60) to start up and 53 cedis a month for the lowest bandwidth deal, which is way beyond the resources of most entrepreneurs in Accra. So they check their mail in cafes instead, at 50 pesewas an hour. However, the list of challenges for someone attempting to run an internet café is formidable:
Computers cost approximately double what they do in rich countries due to import duties, plus the inflation rate in Ghana is running at 18% and the cedi has lost about a third of its purchasing power over the last year alone. So imported computers are getting beyond the reach of most small businesses. Internet cafes tend to make do with second hand ones from abroad, bought at Tema port or through dealers in Accra – a four or five-year-old PC will cost you about US$300, which is more affordable than the thousand or so for a decent new model.
Connectivity is expensive for cafes: Vodafone, the owner of the fixed network and thus the main ISP for the country, has a business rate of 243 cedis ($164) a month for cafes. There are lower rates, but the cafes are told they should buy the most bandwidth possible, and they tend to do so because there is no information available on what they are getting. There is some debate over whether the ISP actually manages bandwidth, and whether those paying the top rate are getting any more connectivity than those paying less – but that’s for another time.
The main issue for these businesses, however, is credit. This is the word I have heard over and over again, as I have interviewed café owners all over Ghana. There is no access to credit for small-scale businesses. At all.
This seems to be down to a lack of a credit culture, which is not entirely a bad thing. Rich countries’ financial practices haven’t exactly been giving credit a good name lately. Nor have they been setting a good example for their neighbours in terms of how to use credit without destroying everything they were trying to build in the first place. However, there is a case for credit where a new sector needs to expand, and where the equipment that can build the business is in critically short supply.
What I have been discovering is that there is a credit gap where these SMEs are concerned. Ghana’s two credit markets exist at the extreme ends of the scale: if you are a poor rural woman looking for a few dollars to grow your shea butter business, or to buy soap to sell in the market, you are in luck. Some microcredit scheme will lend you $50 and charge you 50% interest on it. Alternately, if you are a Big Man on the local scene, with a long-established business and political connections, you will be able to get a bank loan, which will run you about 40% interest and which you will inevitably have to pay back within a year or 18 months. Loans for longer than a year are almost unheard of in Ghana.
So these small businesses, being a new sector, run by young entrepreneurs who don’t have a lot of collateral yet, are out of luck. I interviewed a café owner this week who had been on a fruitless search for a loan to replace his ancient computers all year. Having tried the larger banks and been refused, he went to his local smaller-scale savings and loan company (not a loan shark but a registered bank) asking for 1,500 cedis (about US$1,000). He was quoted – get this – an interest rate of 48%, and a loan period of just one year. The bank also told him they would only give him access to 1,100 of the amount, and would ‘bank’ the rest for him. Meanwhile, although they were holding onto nearly a third of the amount, they would be charging him interest on the full 1,500. Understandably, he said no. Banks tend to ask for the deeds of people’s houses and the papers for their cars when they take out a loan, and bank managers have good political connections so that if they decide to take your house, there’s probably not much you can do about it.
Credit cards, which might elsewhere act as a stopgap when businesses have to expand, are unavailable to all but the richest Ghanaians. Tim Little has covered the credit card issue in his blog: http://timjlittle.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/a-challenge-to-geeks-and-bankers/. He demonstrates why café owners, who deal almost entirely in hardware and software that is only available overseas, cannot buy anything from outside Ghana. When we need antivirus software or a accounting software, we go online. When Ghanaian businesses need those things, they go open source. It’s an open secret that Microsoft Office 2003 is effectively open source software in Ghana, since enough people have copied it from the few imported CDs that were available that is can now be shared for free. This is not because they are bad people who want to pirate software, it’s because even if they want to buy it, they can’t.
So what are they doing instead? Well, the reason I am a migration researcher surveying internet cafes is that they fill the gap with inputs from overseas. Family and friends abroad send computers directly, or bring them in person. Small items such as USB sticks are ‘imported’ in people’s luggage when they come home for a holiday. I personally helped re-equip a friend’s café when a surge from the electric grid blew up his routers and switches – I brought in 26 kilos of electronics in my luggage after a trip home, because they were so exorbitantly priced and impossible to get hold of here that it was quicker just to buy them in London and fly them in personally. So migration is a mainstay of these small IT businesses.
Of course, the only thing that’s harder for a small-scale entrepreneur to get than credit, is a visa. But that’s a story for another time.
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.
View Larger Map
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.
Starting off in Accra, I find myself in a Rumsfeld-like situation where I have to define what I don’t know. There is so much I don’t know that it’s hard to find a place to start, but the dynamics of entrepreneurship in West Africa is one big area where I draw a blank. People have looked at microenterprises a lot, and also farming. There is a literature on how these things contribute to development. But I am looking at a new field, and am not sure how to address it. Small-scale companies in the tech sector are a new development here, and I am having to try to figure out what questions to ask.
One thing that is confusing me is that these businesses seem to survive without any visible means of support. They infrequently make a profit, but people seem to be content to pour resources into them in the hope that they may, or just to keep them going without actually making money from them. There are several possibilities: one, that they are classic African businesses that are designed to provide employment for family and friends, and just need to break even (or come reasonably close) to fulfil their purpose. Two, that they are not about profit, but instead are about the aspiration to take part in what is seen as modern international culture. So profit may be incidental to their function. There may be an option three, which I have not yet discovered. So this week I need to figure out how to ask people what they are doing, not just how it is going.
In other news, the rainy season is unusually rainy. Over in Kaneshie, the city’s biggest market area, there was a storm last weekend that in the space of two hours tore up the main road, flooded the area to chest depth, and drowned 7 people. Everyone has had to move, and the rains keep on coming. As I write, it has been raining almost solidly for about 6 days, and the streets are like rivers.
kaneshie flood damage
(thanks to Hannah for photos)
The reason for the flood is that a ‘river’ (sewer) burst its banks due to a critical build-up of rubbish. This was partly due to the lack of rubbish bins in an area that is one of the country’s busiest, but also due to people not figuring out a way to keep the neighbourhood viable despite a lack of bins. People throw things out of bus windows, they throw things off overpasses, they throw things on the ground as they walk around. Traders throw out unused food, bags, water containers. The whole of Accra is covered in a layer of plastic rubbish that moves around whenever it rains, blocking the storm drains and forming mosquito-nurseries as soon as the rain stops. A company, Zoomlion, is under contract to clear up, but the scale is too great. The people of the neighbourhood are now complaining that there is a risk of cholera, while others are pointing out that there would be less risk if people didn’t use the street as a public toilet. Then there is the argument that if there aren’t any public toilets, what do they expect will happen…
kaneshie cleanup
Here are some news reports and more pictures:
http://www.modernghana.com/GhanaHome/NewsArchive/category.asp?menu_id=1&sub_menu_id=90&gender=3
It’s amazing that this could happen in the centre of a city, even a coastal one. Particularly one that, ironically, has water delivery problems…
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.
To Bolgatanga, fleeing the internet survey Latif and I have been running in Tamale. It turns out a whole hour online is too much to offer people – I got 111 responses in just a few hours. People often buy time online here in increments of 10 minutes. So next time I will offer half an hour instead, and see what happens. Survey Monkey, the service I am using to do the online research, is brillant though, I recommend it. You can see the results in real time, analyse them, cross-reference them, and see the IP addresses so you know where your results came from. And it loads easily, which is important in Ghana where connections are slow. However, in this case it was too efficient. I left it alone for a few hours and it became a monster. More thought needs to go into this…
I am in Bolgatanga now, staying at Doris’ house. Doris is great – she goes shopping on her motorbike in Bolga market’s tiny alleyways, shouting hello to people as she roars by.
doris shopping
Her compound, where I am staying, has lots of very polite children who make a sound exactly like muppets, and white chickens dyed pink running around.
doris' pink chickens
Bolga is interesting – the Upper East region is quite Catholic, so suddenly I am seeing pigs running around everywhere, along with the cows and goats. We came back tonight to find a family of piglets wandering around the compound, as people were trying to sleep out in the yard. To misquote George Bush, it turns out it is possible for humans and piglets to coexist peacefully.
kids at the compound
At a bar in Bolga, I was reminded again how normal it is for children to work here. They sell water and food, work on farms and plantations, in shops, everywhere in fact. The Ghanaian census counts the working population as everyone over the age of 6. Sometimes it’s disturbing, but usually it is just normality. This evening, quite small children (around 10 or so) were serving drinks in the bar where Doris and I went. One little girl served a table near us, where four large men were sitting. One of them put his hand on her back as she put his drink down, and though the gesture was momentary, it was one of the nastiest things I have seen since I came here. It explained perfectly why, although child work is not always exploitative, it’s dangerous to accept it as normal.
…Well, mainly taking names, interspersed with trying to get cars to go away. Today I finished the first of my network studies, which involve asking managers of internet companies who they know. And then asking them again. And then getting them to look at their cellphone contacts and asking some more. Until everyone involved wants to die. But it’s done, at least till they hire some new staff and I go back there to do some more interviews in a couple of months.
So today was mainly walking around, taking trotros, finding people, waiting, finding more people, waiting some more. Appointments here are more a jumping-off point for negotiation than a firm commitment to be somewhere. They’re aspirational – a metaphor for what would happen in an ideal world. So one waits, one goes and does some other stuff, one contemplates, one waits some more. And eventually, the person turns up and you have to fit what should take an hour into fifteen minutes. But if you can do it, the sense of achievement is monumental.
A day full of ordinary things: Austin, the guy who sells coconuts, which are the perfect filler for when you have missed lunch waiting for someone and they may come back any minute:
and getting around. Mainly doing this on trotros, but the taxis just won’t give up. Obrunis seem to be the main group who hire taxis just for themselves (everyone else uses shared ones that travel known routes, like buses), so taxis get excited at the sight of us. As you walk down the street in the morning, every single taxi (i.e. every second vehicle) honks at you in case you want a ride. What really gets them going, though, is an obruni who appears to be tired, or sick, or otherwise flagging. It’s like lions going after buffalo – they target the old and the infirm. I was walking slowly back this evening, deep in thought and having inhaled enough exhaust fumes to kill a rhino, and turned round to find I had about five taxis lined up, following me hopefully up the street, with the rest of Accra hooting at them to move on.
Here’s my commute:
ring road rush hour
For some reason the photo doesn’t pick up how thick the air is by 5pm, but you could stand a spoon up in it. It’s like putting your mouth to an exhaust pipe. Never mind. Next week I go north to Tamale, where they have air.
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
…or the promise of it, at last. I set up interviews with senior management at a major internet company, which means I can get the first of my network studies done before I go north. Which is good. Unfortunately, though, it entails explaining myself, which is not so good. My study has three levels, and I tend to jump to whichever the person in question knows best – technology, entrepreneurship, migration. I am interested in migration, but the way to address what interests me most is through studying entrepreneurship among returnees. And the tech sector is one way to do that in Ghana, as it’s where you often find the migrants. So there are three explanations of my project, all of which more or less make sense until I jump between them. Then people glaze over and think about going to get a cup of coffee. So I wrote three paragraphs about what questions I’ll be asking, and how I will keep their responses private, and printed out some copies for people. This works much better because it doesn’t involve me speaking at all. I am wondering about taping my mouth shut in order to maximise clarity about my work.
Here are some of the staff at Busy, who have been helping me arrange my interviews:
boat, faustina and aida
I have also been re-encountering Ghanaian phone etiquette. Once you give your number to anyone, you need to be prepared for calls at any time of the day or night. And when you pick up, the person will often launch into conversation without identifying themselves, even if you have never met them before. I feel so unfriendly saying ‘who are you?’ that I often just talk to them, and try to figure out who they are.
It’s all go here. It’s Hannah’s birthday today, and last night Chris Smith and his friend Mike arrived from Burkina on their way to surf. So we went out to Osu to freak them out with the non-Burkinabe food. It was successful. Here they are on Oxford street, significantly browner than they were before two months in Burkina:
We also found a fabulous food stall on our way to dinner. It has the ideal mix of inviting dishes, emotional independence and cryptic reflection. It was either started by someone on the run from the law, who needed to make a quick buck and was good with banku, or someone who wanted to offer moral advice but knew people wouldn’t pay attention without the lure of delicious foodstuffs. Here it is:
…means small small. That’s what I’ve been up to today. Getting people bus tickets for the weekend, which was accomplished in 4 extremely slow trotro rides during the morning rush hour, and which I later realised I could have walked; trying to buy a mattress, which was confusing because people still haven’t got used to the re-denominated currency (the mattress either cost 1.2 million cedis, 21 cedis, 12 cedis, or 120 cedis, but we couldn’t agree so I couldn’t pay for it); and working on my survey questionnaires which have become corrupted on my USB drive and cannot be read. The last is quite annoying, but fortunately I have the most recent drafts saved, and things are always better the second time you write them down.
I have finally got onto a Ghanaian schedule – you get up when the neighbourhood gets up, in our case around 6.30. First there’s a guy who walks around playing a sewing machine with a pair of metal scissors, then there’s a guy who polishes shoes and plays a box with a leather strop, then there’s someone who rings a small handbell for reasons best known to themselves. The handbell wakes up the cockerel who lives next door, and he takes over until around 3pm when the afternoon rush hour begins and everyone comes by on the second loop of the day.
Here is my street, from the balcony of the house where I am staying:
The house opposite has homing pigeons, from the last people who lived there. There are temporary tenants there now who live mainly on the balcony, but the pigeons are clearly the landlords. There’s a whole pigeon drama that occurs on the rooftop, involving feuds and passionate affairs and fighting and a lot of strutting around. It’s like a Welsh nightclub. Apparently the racing pigeon fashion came in with President Nkrumah in the 50′s: he became obsessed with homing pigeons and wanted to make keeping them a national pastime. Ghana has been through a lot since then, but the pigeons’ descendants remain. This is the house opposite, with only two pigeons visible. The others are attending a summit on the other side of the roof, discussing a possible peace treaty.
