Quick update: As of Sept 29, the internet decided to stop working in my room. It didn’t gradually get that way; late the night of Sept 28th it was working totally fine, and the 29th it doesn’t work at all. That’s my excuse for why this is almost a week late. I had to type it and then take it all the way up to the computer lab on a flash drive to post it! Woe is me!
Ghana! Oh shit! I’m gonna get malaria and dengue fever and dysentery and bubonic plague and yadda yadda yadda. The best way for Ghana to be fun is to just say “yeah whatever” about all the tropical diseases and filth and poverty that you see and just kind of dive in like you would any other country. Since I’m a chicken I didn’t really do this and went on SAS sponsored trips instead. But I’d say I still had as big a blast or more than anyone else.
The first day I had to complete a required visit to the Elmina and Cape Coast castles for my class on globalization. My first impressions of Ghana were mostly surprise at how welcoming everyone was. As the bus drove from Takoradi east along the coast to Elmina, crowds of schoolchildren in their uniforms would run out of the building or stop their soccer games to wave as we went by. They were overjoyed to see foreigners, no mistake. It seemed fake at first, like they were putting on a show, but we all began to realize that they actually were THAT happy we were there. More on this later. The cities and towns in Ghana are a mixture of relatively nice private houses, short bunkhouse-type public housing apartments, and the ubiquitous Ghanaian house with cinderblock walls and a corrugated metal roof. Some areas looked better than parts of Pittsburgh I’ve seen, others looked like... the third world I guess. It was interesting to see that even in the bad-looking areas the houses did all have electricity and tons of TV antennae and satellite dishes. Their drains are all in the streets and run along next to the road. The water in them smells... interesting. It’s the kind of water that if you accidentally stepped in it you’d want to burn your shoes and buy a new pair instead of try to clean them.
Everyone in Ghana has a shop. They sell anything and everything and it seems like they sit outside at the storefront all day. All this stuff must come from China and places like that, since most of it seemed kind of secondhand. Same with the clothes. Lots of donated clothes come from old sports teams or the losers of superbowls. I saw a surprising number of US sports t-shirts. One man I saw today (Friday) was wearing a very new-looking Ovechkin jersey t-shirt. I asked him where he got it and he said “here in Takoradi.” He didn’t know who Ovechkin was, and I told him he was an ice hockey player from Russia and he was amazed. It was really interesting to see how our stuff ends up in countries like Ghana. Who knows how the guy that sold it to him got that shirt. It wasn’t an old secondhand; it was brand new. Then we talked about Washington and sports and our respective cities. Like literally every Ghanaan I talked to, he loved the USA and hoped to visit New York City and DC at some point in the future. The Cab driver who drove me back to the port from the market in Takoradi wanted to take his international driver’s license to the USA and work as a driver there and send money back to Ghana to get his family a nice house. I gave him 5 cedis for a 2 cedi ride and wished him all the best. Anyway a bit of a tangent there... back to the tours, which were on Wednesday.
Both of the castles had been built by Europeans for use first as trading posts but then as slave dungeons and loading ports. Elmina was constructed by the Portuguese in the 1480s (old!) and Cape Coast was built by the Dutch, Swedish, and British in the 17th century. Both of them had roughly the same kinds of slave quarters but Cape Coast seemed to be a big bigger. Both of them had also changed hands between various European nations at various points in their history.
They’re pretty much interchangeable. Both of them had huge dungeons with no light whatsoever for the slaves in them. All of the dungeons were gender segregated and had drains built into the floor where the slaves were expected to use the bathroom, but in actuality it just piled up. In the Cape Coast male dungeon there was an easily visible line on the wall where the archaeologists stopped digging through gravel and started digging through solidified human shit. It was knee-high. And it was like this while the slaves spent months inside with very little light and only enough food and water to survive. Some slaves refused food and water and instead chose to die there. They packed about 200 slaves into a space the size of a large classroom, and they were always shackled together. It was gut-wrenching to be in the same room where that kind of thing had happened.
In between the two castle visits we stopped for lunch at an all-inclusive resort type place right on the coast. The tour guide said it was Ghanaian-owned and operated, but it still felt a little bit awkward, exclusivist, and “fake.” In the midst of country shacks and banana plantations, there was this place with a golf course, swimming pool, tennis courts, and “beach cabins” where we ate a catered lunch outdoors on the beach and watched a performance by some drummers and acrobats. These guys were good. They did a lot of traditional dancing and then some fire eating and breathing and balancing big bowls on sticks which they held on top of their heads and hands and, creatively, in their pants. The whole mood of the performance was light-hearted, and they pantomimed a few off-color jokes. I couldn’t tell if it was all meant to tell a single story, but the performance was entertaining anyway. On the way back to the bus they told me they were from a cultural society in Elmina that usually performs for donations but had been hired by the SAS trip.
As I said, the Cape Coast castle, which we visited next after lunch was very similar to the Elmina castle which we had visited before lunch. It was slightly newer however and wasn’t quite as Portuguese-looking. Its dungeons were larger and it had a more complete museum about the history of European-African contact and the slave trade in the early modern period. There was some guy walking around saying you had to pay a cedi to take pictures, but I think they threw him out after the tour guides realized he didn’t actually work for the museum. I hid some other SASer’s cameras in my bag so he wouldn’t come harass them about it. After that tour we drove back to Takoradi the same way. I took note of all the schools we passed. It’s good that they have so many of them built; it seems like Ghana is really on its way towards better things.
The second day in Ghana was the first day of the cultural immersion trip. The bus bounced, pitched, and lurched its way across the paved and sort-of-paved roads to a village north of Elmina. There are no superhighways in Ghana, just mid-range roads with houses on them that happen to go further than other roads. They’re paved but are more potholes than paving so sometimes it seems like it’d actually be easier to just drive offroad.
Once we got to the village we were greeted by some drummers. Hey these guys look familiar! Its the guys from lunch yesterday! I’d learn later they’re called the Elmina Culture Group (or something like that... forgot the name, sorry.) After that, there was the African naming ceremony, where we all received a name in Twi, the local language. In Ghana you have a name based on the day of the week of your birth. Mine was Saturday, so I’m named Kwame (like their first president Kwame Nkrumah). My last name was Mensah, which was the last name of the family I would be staying with.
Before the naming ceremony began, there was the pouring of a libation to ensure that the friendship between SAS and the village was proper in the eyes of the supreme deity, whichever one you might happen to believe in. This involved the village chief linguist, who speaks for the chief. The chief does not have to speak to anyone, although he was a pretty nice guy and as I’d find out the next day actually have some cool stories- he’s been to a Nationals game in Washington DC! Anyway, the linguist poured a bottle of schnapps on the ground and recited a long prayer as he did so. A very long prayer. In Twi. I had no idea what he was saying but it went on for about 10 minutes.
Once that was all finished (the naming ceremony took a while since it was done one at a time for every SAS student) we were taken to lunch at another all-inclusive resort which was a bit awkward, but then came back to the village to meet our families. I found my host sister, the only member of her family who spoke English, named Juliana. She was a 15 year old girl who had just graduated from the 3rd level of post-grammar school. Ghanaian kids go to about 5 levels of school from what I understand. Grammar school is like 1st thru 4th grade, and then the levels afterwards are about 3 years each, with the 5th level being university. Juliana was very nice to show us around her house. The house itself was actually a series of smaller rooms that all shared a common courtyard. In this courtyard I met about 15 young children, since several families shared it. The kitchen was under a roof but behind a half-wall, which was pretty interesting. Inside the house they had good furnishings: comfortable mattresses, couches, TVs, a computer, rugs, etc, but at the same time they cooked with a wood fire. Ghana is strange like that. In some of the shantytowns we passed, the houses looked like they were barely standing, the gutters outside of them brimming with filth, and yet every single house had electricity and a TV antenna or dish. Every single one. But back on topic here... after the tour around the house we sat down and played a board game I’d never seen before. The name escapes me, but its played with the same board and stones as mancala, the Egyptian game. It’s a bit hard to explain the rules (especially when there’s a language barrier... imagine how it was for us!) but its easy enough to figure out after playing a little bit. The Ghana post will continue in part 2....
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