I mentioned that Ghana is not my favourite place in the world. My impression was that it is a sad, tattered, dirty, disheveled kind of place.; a little like a battered and bruised child:you look at the child as it is still beautiful in its inherently innocent way, but abused and spoilt by everyone who has contributed to its upbringing. I have thought about my feelings for Ghana and really tried to analyse what it is that I did not like about the country. The people, yes, are , in my personal opinion, definitely not likable – surly, unfriendly, downright rude whilst at the same time proclaiming to the world how 'Christian' they are – thrusting their religion – or rather their church – in your face without ever giving evidence of their belief. I resented that. It is people like these that cause the cynics out there – those who commonly judge everyone in a single bunch, to tar “all Christians” with the same brush –. What I also resented was that up to Ghana we had only been in Muslim countries and, again in my personal experience, the people were generally welcoming, friendly, warm and most certainly hospitable. They were eager to find out more about us and tell us more about them. Even in the instances where we were invited into the homes of strict Muslims and shared a meal with them, we, as non-muslim, were made to feel welcome and completely at home and treated with respect at all times. We were never made to feel that we were the outsiders because we did not share in their religion. Whenever any topic came under discussion that had to do with the differences in religions and in particular some of the customs of the Muslim people that we as non-muslims find hard to understand – such as female circumcision, there was no defensiveness, nor any arrogance – no matter of 'we are right and you are wrong', but simply an explanation of the reasons for the custom – and a request that we do not judge them by our tenets but rather try to understand theirs.
But it has to be more – much more than that; it cannot and must not become a comparison between two religions, as facile as it appeared to be. Yet the difference did in so many ways seem to boil down to exactly that. In the previous countries one could not help but be deeply impressed with the order and discipline of the whole way of life and consequently the whole system. As you drove through villages and past communities, you would see people stand or kneel, there where they are, facing east, praying. Along the road, you see another truck or vehicle – or donkey cart, stop, put down a plastic mat, take a bottle of water and go through the process of washing hands, feet, head, and praying. It takes five minutes five times in their day and seems to just be part of their day. No big bill boards every ten metres advertising yet another church or preacher as you have in Ghana – where there seems to be more choice of places and kinds of worship than in all the rest of the world put together – but as natural as breathing, their praying forms part of what they do in their daily lives. And this quiet discipline reflects in everything else – their social structure, their attitude – and importantly, their respect towards those around them.
Then, the moment we crossed the border into Ghana from Burkino Faso, everything changed. The bad roads became ten times worse. Now the badly tarred roads became once-excellent-roads-turned-to-a-series-of-giant-potholes. You can actually see that they were once good roads. And then they were simply forgotten. Never maintained. Never cared for. Like the unadopted roads of an English village, this rich and 'stable' country's national roads are orphaned and left to disintegrate.
Up to the Ghanaian border, in all the much much poorer neighbouring countries we have been travelling through, we have been impressed with the beautifully planned and maintained villages of the African countryside – with their neat mud houses, impeccable walled compounds, cleanly swept central courtyards where the women stamped their corn, cooked their food over neatly built mud cooking areas, where each village had a communal oven, again built in mud, the fire continuously kept alive, where polished wood benches ringed the biggest mango tree for the old men to sit in the shade and watch the world go by, where the children were all dressed in bright local cloth, looking like they were dressed up for the visitors, where each and every community seem to have a school – even if just one room, even if many and all ages in only one class, with a big tree outside where they could play during break time, where each community had its place of worship – mostly a mosque, but sometimes a mosque and a Christian church standing side by side. Crossing the border into Ghana, we now saw a hodgepodge of broken down, dilapidated, dirty little hovels with no apparent order in layout, no central courtyard or tree with benches, the mud walls of the houses not plastered in mud and re-plastered after every rainy season – as was the case in Mali and Burkina, but left to crumble and disintegrate and, when completely uninhabitable, abandoned where it stands and another equally badly built house being constructed right next to it. And so we got the impression that there are more half-built houses in Ghana that finished houses, and those that had been finished were already halfway crumbling and falling apart soon after.
If the decay and neglect were not that noticeable when we entered this new country, then the way people dressed most definitely was. In every country up to now the people of that nation proudly wear their national dress or variations thereof. I have time and again raved about the colourful clothes – the vibrant fabrics that so perfectly depict the spirit and the heritage of the country – the way the fabrics tell stories. Men, women and children – almost all are dressed in their tribal or clan or national dress. Even driving past villages where the women and children are working and playing in the inner courtyards of the compounds – even there they are dressed in their traditional clothing.
But then we drove across the border in Ghana and what did we see? Almost everyone dressed, at best, in t-shirts and tracksuit pants and flip-flops! Not matching. Not traditional. Not even clean.We did see some Assanti dressed in their traditional clothing – the men with black self-patterned cloth wrapped around their bodies, one piece over one shoulder and the rest of the ample fabric bundled under the left arm, and the women in the same fabrics but made up in elaborate couture, figure hugging long dresses with dramatic headdresses - also in the same fabric. But these beautifully dressed people were on their way to a funeral and therefore in their national dress. The rest looked nothing like it.
And then the big disappointment when Kyle and Randy joined me to go look for the ancient Assanti buildings we saw marked on the map and which, according to the atlas, is a Worl Heritage site. We hired a taxi to take us there, drove around for an entire morning, asking everyone on the way, walking through villages and looking for them, but never found them. And no one had ever heard about them. If I think how Yaya had shown us 'his' Djenne with such pride and knowledge and enthusiasm and how Assigue had shown us 'his' Dogons with such joy and love, and of every other place where we had enjoyed the fascinating and rich history and heritage of the various countries and regions, and all I could find in Ghana was the sad and dusty Assanti museum in Kumasi with its handful of relics of a bygone area of one of the richest nations and cultures and civilisations Africa had ever known.
Oh yes – the Ghanaians make much of the slave trade and their museums at the fort in Cape Coast has a beautiful exhibition on show and the tour through the fort where the slaves were brought before being shipped away is moving and disturbing – and interestingly, very realistically presented. For quite a few of the group it was an eye-opener discovering for the first time that it was in fact the local African chiefs and kings that provided the slaves to the European traders and that they had in fact been trading slaves amongst themselves since the 8th century – many centuries before the first Arab or Europeans came to these parts. Also, the Assanti nation gained their riches from slaves as much as they did from gold. The event of the Christian missionaries and then the colonising Europeans definitely had a confusing and bewildering effect on this nation, and I wondered whether this history of slave trading and the accompanying feeling of guilt and loss and pain had a part to play in the loss of identity of this nation. There is no doubt that it must have had an effect on the psyche of the people – a huge and devastating effect. But – and I am thinking out loud now, we visited Togo and Benin and, especially in Benin, the scars of the slave trade are deep and painful. Many thousands more slaves left from the Beninois shores than from the much larger Ghana and the Beninois are much more cognisant of the fact that their kings enriched themselves – and curried favour from the European traders – by taking whiskey and tobacco – and money – in return for not only their slaves from enemy tribes, but from their very own people. But the people from Benin have not lost their identity in the process – on the contrary. They probably have a far stronger national identity than any of the other countries we have travelled through thus far.
Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian author, commented in Things Fall Apart about the crossroads of culture in which Africans have been living since the white man came to the continent. The ensuing identity crisis is markedly evident in Ghana. On the one hand you have the customs and traditions of their ancestors, the animist and ancestral rituals and deep-seated traditional beliefs, what Achebe calls “ all that rubbish about the evil forces and irrational passions prowling through Africa's heart of darkness”. On the other hand there is the promise of salvation and progress and 'civilisation' on condition that all that has been held sacred in the family, in the mores and the values of the tribe be renounced and rejected. There was, as he says, only black and white in this new religion and new way of life. Everything of value in their own culture had to left behind; they had to abandoned their ancestral religious beliefs completely. You could not even take what was good from your past life, adjust them to the Christian church's teachings and keep that as the foundation of the new life. You literally had to turn tour back on your family – your ancestors, your parents, your siblings, your friends. 'A man might perish there wrestling with multiple-headed spirits, but also he might be lucky and return to his people with the boon of prophetic vision', wrote Achebe.
Ghana did not seem to have that luck. It seems in Ghana, not many were that lucky.
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