Field trip to Northern Ghana (album)

Field trip to Northern Ghana

Great Northern Trek, Days Two and Three: In Yendi

Ah, yes, the hotel. The only really serious accommodation problem we encountered on this (or any other) field trip. When we stayed there in 2005, on Calvin’s first visit to Yendi, it had just opened—the first and only guesthouse able to accommodate as large a group as ours. The staff were friendly and efficient, the rooms clean, each with a private bath with functioning plumbing—all in all it was a lovely place to stay, and very inexpensive. Fast-forward five years. The prices have increased nearly 400%, but most of the rooms are filthy, the plumbing is not working properly in any of the bathrooms (some have constant leaks, some nonfunctioning toilets or showers), and we all got lots of bites overnight from vermin living in the beds and rooms. (We didn’t actually see anything biting us, but whatever it was raised bright red welts that took several days to subside and stop itching.) The staff were nearly impossible to find, and when we did track them down and asked for help making plumbing fixtures work or sweeping out the filthiest rooms, they made vague promises and then disappeared again.

We wish we’d arranged our trip to spend just one night there, or none. But the visit to Yendi was immensely valuable all the same, as in 2005. And most of the credit is due again to one man: Al-Haji Sulemana Alhassan, who was one of Samuel Ntewusu’s secondary-school teachers. He is the Executive Director of BIRDS, the Bang-Gu-Mana Integrated Regional Development Society. (“Bang-gu-mana” is Dagbani for “gaining wisdom.”) It was founded in the late 1990s in response to ethnic conflicts that had flared up ten years earlier, then had been provisionally resolved in the early 1990s thanks to mediation efforts by NGO’s. But the outside organizations paid little attention to local perspectives or priorities: they conducted their meetings, spent their funds, wrote their reports, and went home, leaving most of the underlying issues unresolved. Sulemana decided to mobilize local resources instead.

BIRDS is active now in seven different areas (more than in 2005): primary education, women’s empowerment, conflict management and peacebuilding, community participation in governance, health education, environmental education, and social science research. In each area it partners with governmental and NGO agencies: he named Ibis West Africa (a German NGO focusing on gender issues and children’s welfare), Hope for Children (UK), Bayport Financial Services (in Ghana, sponsor of an annual “Ride for Peace”), National TB Control Programme, and the Ghana AIDS Commission, as well as the district assemblies and administrators. Funding comes from NGO’s, from private donations, and from farm income, but it is never enough. BIRDS now owns two computers and one motorbike, he said, but rents its offices. Someday Sulemana hopes to have a vehicle with four wheels, not two. (Though a great many Northern villages are accessible only with two feet or two wheels, not by car or truck.)

In 2005 Sulemana gave us a very brief overview of his work at his offices, with several associates and board members on hand, and then we headed out on a tour of several community projects. This time he made his presentation alone, using a low-tech Powerpoint: he had written a summary of BIRDS history, programs, governance, and staff on seven or eight large sheets of paper on an easel. And because it was a teacher training day we were unable to visit the school. So we made just one site visit, to a women’s shea butter collective, where several elderly women showed us how they extract the oil from shea tree nuts, boil it down to a dark mass, filter it and strain off the liquid, and then package and sell the rich salve that remains—much in demand for the Body Shop and every other cosmetics maker in the world. This is a major source of cash income in the north, and still a highly decentralized household industry, because the shea nut trees grow everywhere, in the forests and among other crops, but are too slow-growing and produce too little per tree to be economical as a cultivated crop. So nearly all the shea butter that Ghana exports is made from nuts that are gathered one by one by women and children, on farms and on public land.

Al-Haji Sulemana is Moslem (the title indicates that he has made the Hajj), as are most residents of Yendi, and so are most of the six members of his board (three men, three women) and staff (three employees plus five National Service workers). But he works closely with the Christian leaders in town, and BIRDS meetings always open with Christian prayer and close with a Koranic blessing or vice versa. The organization’s long-term goals, he said, are three: sustainable peace, improved education for girls, and wealth generation by improving agriculture and developing local industry. All projects are evaluated regularly: those involved are asked to complete questionnaires and participate in focus groups when a project is at its midpoint, and annual evaluations of each project are also conducted by outsiders.

The students had a chance to ask questions that elicited more about the career path of this remarkable man. He was planning to study medicine, he said, but had to abandon that plan when Ghana’s education system went to pieces in the 1980s and nearly all the qualified teachers fled to Nigeria to find work. In his Yendi secondary school, with no science teachers left, he taught biology classes for his fellow students. He decided to pursue teacher training instead of medicine and returned to his hometown to teach (Samuel Ntewusu was one of his students), until he founded BIRDS and shifted into full-time community development.

What I described above was actually our programme for Monday morning. Sunday was our first day in Yendi, when we planned to attend the 7 am English-language Mass at the Catholic church, and then go out on our scheduled visits, but I turned out that there wasn’t one. So we held our own worship service at the restaurant where we went for breakfast (and also for dinner Saturday and Sunday—a new Church of Christ facility that seems to be the only place in town with seating for more than 10). And then we went off on a 20-km, one-hour excursion to Ngadi Tindang, a village about 20 km from Yendi that serves as one of six “witches’ camps” in Northern Ghana. We had heard about the camps in 2004 and 2005, but it was not til 2008 that Sulemana arranged for a visit by the Calvin group. The 2009 group followed suit, and—countering my misgivings—both Amy and Beryl strongly recommended that we do so too. Their recommendation was wise: it was a strange but in the end worthwhile experience.

What is a “witches’ camp”? Students had images of hags bent over cauldrons casting spells, or something of the sort. I envisioned beaten-down and penniless old women living under strict social quarantine. The reality: it is a place of refuge for members of several northern ethnic groups who have been accused of witchcraft, often because of an unexplained death or illness in their extended family. They cannot remain in their home villages, where they would be shunned at best, killed at worst. Relatives bring them to one of the recognized witches’ villages and leave them in the care of the traditional priest. Sometimes they are accompanied by their husbands—or their wives, since about 20% of the “witches” in the camp are men—and their children. Some younger women banished from their home communities marry and raise families in the camp, as do some children who accompany parents to the camp and grow up there. All in all it’s a lively place full of noisy children, men of every age group, and predominantly older women. One of our cultural lecturers described the phenomenon of witchcraft accusation as a misguided response to behavioral and psychological changes attending menopause, and in some cases that account fits. But younger women and men are also regularly driven out of the communities if they are believed to have caused someone’s sickness or death. On the bus afterward the students peppered both Samuels with questions about why Ghanaians continue to tolerate such superstitious practices that cause such hardship, but it became clear that, for both of these highly educated Ghanaians, witchcraft is not superstition but undeniable reality. Both recounted tales of strange ailments or economic setbacks in their families that were caused by jealous or malevolent neighbors, and both agreed that witches cannot stay in their communities once their activities are uncovered. Westerners who think this is all nonsense, and who insist that disease and death can be fully explained in physical terms, are simply ignoring half of the world that we all live in.

Before we could proceed to the camp with Sulemana and our two Samuels we parked our bus at the end of the road and proceeded on a foot trail to the village adjacent to the camp, where we presented ourselves to the chief and offered a small gift. Then we went on to the camp and greeted the traditional priest, who of course also also required a small gift. Through an assistant who speaks English, he told us that he cares for the spiritual and physical needs of the camp’s residents. For those who are truly guilty of practicing witchcraft he performs rites to expel the evil spirits that have taken residence in them: the accused buys a fowl (not just any fowl, one that is healthy and attractive and appealing to the gods), the priest offers prayers and libations and slits the bird’s throat. If it flops over to the left side, the spirits have been driven out and the individual can resume normal life. But returning home is impossible, since the village will not believe they have been cured and will bring new accusations. So the now-cured witches remain in the camp.

All this is undertaken, the priest assured us, only after he has held a proper trial to determine whether the accusation of witchcraft was well-founded. How do you conduct the trial, we asked? The accused brings a suitable fowl, I say prayers and pour libations, I slit the fowl’s throat, and then if it flops over to the left side I know the person is innocent; to the right side proves her guilt.

I wanted to ask about the appeals procedure in this juridical system. But was afraid it would turn out to involve slaughtering a fowl.

As you may have surmised I was not very favorably impressed by the priest, even though he told us he receives no payment for his services, only a voluntary gift from time to time. Also lots of fowls. There is also a Christian pastor who looks after the residents of the camp, and in the village are a church and also a mosque that many residents attend. But they live in abject poverty, since they have very little land to cultivate—only what the neighboring villagers can spare—and no opportunities for other employment in their remote area of the bush.

And yet there was a very positive spirit among the residents—mostly women, a handful of men, and piles of children—who came to the clearing beneath a huge central tree to welcome us. Before leaving Legon Susan had purchased gifts for the women: two large cartons of laundry soap bars that we cut up and distributed, and several bags of Maggi cooking cubes. All in all we handed out gifts to more than a hundred residents.

Using Sulemana and Samuel and a man from the village as translators—we needed to cover three languages, English and Dagbani and Kokomba—we thanked the women for receiving us and told them we hoped they would soon be able to return to their home villages and their families. An old woman stood up to reply for the group. None of us are witches, she said—we were all falsely accused. But we do not want to return to our home villages. We will never be accepted there, and we have made a good life for ourselves and our families here. We appreciate the interest that you students have shown in our situation. And we are very grateful to Patrick, who came to visit us last year and is a student at your university. He gave us money to register with the National Health Service, and now we receive medical care when needed without charge. I had to go to hospital last month myself and received good treatment, and now I am well again. Our son Patrick has done so much for us!

This was a complete surprise to me. Patrick’s own account, in an email exchange, was that when he came back to Ngani for a week at the end of the semester last year he felt completely useless and spent his days just sitting around doing nothing and getting depressed. But Sulemana confirmed that he had actually done a great deal to help the “witches,” collecting several hundred dollars from friends and family back in the for the NHS registration, which costs about $8 US per person.

Despite the language barrier the students were having interesting conversations with a number of the women who came out to meet us. The men hung back and didn’t interact as much, but the children quickly climbed into students’ laps. We began cutting up the laundry soap and handing it out, trying to be sure we gave something to everyone. Then some young men standing around nearby started playing traditional drums, and the women stood up and began doing traditional dances in a circle, soon joined by many of the Calvin students. For half an hour, under a punishingly hot sun, the circle grew bigger and the crowd cheering them on pressed in more closely, and some of the Calvin students took a turn playing the drums as well. Many of the women put their laundry soap on their heads so their hands were free for dancing. It was an exuberant end to a very unusual visit.

Great Northern Trek, Day One: On the Road

It was more than a month ago that we set out on our longest and most rewarding of all our field trips. In many ways traveling to the North feels like entering an entirely new country. Many Accra residents think of it that way, never having traveled to the places we take the Calvin group such as Tamale, Bolgatanga, Paga, and Mole National Park. Our upstairs neighbor Ken, a music lecturer here at UG, commented, “I’ve always wanted to see the North but I’ve never gone beyond Kumasi.” (Kumasi is 270 km from Accra; Tamale is 380 km farther.)

IAS Senior Fellow Albert Awudoba, who provided an exceptionally thorough and well-organized introduction to the history and cultures of the North in one of our scheduled lectures, was not surprised by this. Northerners come south in search of employment, he said—in agriculture, in urban markets, as day laborers in the cities, or as professors and physicians and lawyers and bankers. Southerners do not go North to Ghana’s poorest and least developed region. But the lack of interest, he said, is mutual. When he was growing up in a village very near the border town of Sirigu (see below for more on Sirigu and its decorated houses), the three-fourths of the country that lies south of Tamale was called simply “Kumasi.” Someone who moved to Accra or Tetchiman or Takoradi or Ho (hundreds of km apart, in four different regions) had moved “to Kumasi.” And all the residents of “Kumasi,” whether they were Ewe (from the Volta Region) or Ga (from around Accra) or Fante (from the Central Region) or Akuapem or Krobo or Shai (from around the Akuapem Hills in the Eastern Region), were simply called “Ashanti.”

We were very fortunate this year to have two Northerners—both named Samuel—as our guides for the trip, at least for the first few days. It wasn’t hard to persuade Samuel Ntewusu to take a couple of days off and accompany us as far as Yendi. He had some business to attend to in Tamale, from which he would return by bus. This year’s logistics coordinator Samuel Abokyi, whose family is in Tamale, had worked on all the lodging arrangements with us and was glad to share responsibilities on the road. The two Samuels could hardly be more different in temperament: Ntewusu is gregarious, loud, opionionated, and overflowing with amazing stories from his childhood and tales of remarkable recent events. I was sitting far ahead of him on the bus and could hear most of what he was telling the students. Abokyi is quiet, unassertive, always ready to help when asked, but content to sit on the bus for hours among the students without speaking, unless they ask him a question. And he speaks so softly that it can be difficult to catch what he says even if you are sitting right beside him.

Traffic between Legon and the Kumasi Road, and on the first section of that road, is very heavy in the morning, and we had a grueling 14 to 15 hour ride ahead of us, so we scheduled our departure for 5 am on Saturday. We managed to pull away only twenty minutes late—a record, I think, for any of our out of town trips. (There always seems to be one student whose alarm didn’t go off, or some similar excuse—but it’s seldom the same one twice.) We had been so happily surprised by the now-excellent road to Cape Coast that we hoped for the same on our drive to the north. No such luck. The main highway connecting Ghana’s two largest cities, Accra and Kumasi, is in far worse condition than in 2005. A stretch of 20 or 30 km between Nsawam and Bunso, when we had been underway only an hour or so, is now a barely passable construction zone, with long stretches of deeply rutted dirt track, gigantic piles of gravel that blocked half the right of way, and one section where we drove right through a blasting zone with huge chunks of rock littering the roadway. All in the name of progress, of course: we could admire the half-finished highway interchanges and dual carriageways as we bumped and jounced past them. But there was a reward at the end of this ordeal: halfway to Kumasi is a roadside rest stop. We remembered it well from previous visits, and here’s how I described it in 2004:

Along the way we stopped at something we hadn’t known existed in Ghana: a highway rest stop! It is a large dirt courtyard surrounded by vendors of fruit, snacks, and cooked food from about 20 different booths. In one corner are the toilets, and a hand-painted sign directs visitors: Gents this way, Ladies that way, ¢200 fee ($0.22). Susan handed over ¢4000 to pay for all 20 visitors, which caused some confusion, because there was another bus making a stop—but it really wasn’t hard to identify the only 19 white patrons. But this, it turned out, was the fee for the urinal, a concrete enclosure with a tiled trench to stand or squat over. If you wanted an actual toilet—for the sake of privacy or because your needs were more complicated than urinating—you had to pay ¢1000 and go to a different area. None of our students were willing to part with eleven cents for more privacy, although the women found the communal nature of the urinals daunting at first. They wanted to use the facility a few at a time, but the passengers of the other bus pushed past and overruled that plan.

In 2010 the place is completely transformed: a large tarred car park, a spacious covered pavilion with tables and chairs and several cafeteria-style food providers around the sides, with lots more food and fruit and coffee vendors outside. The food is varied and tasty—traditional Ghanaian dishes, “beef sandwiches” (a loose adaptation of the burger concept), baked goods, fruit, beer and soft drinks, coffee and tea, with prices a bit higher than in Accra. And the bathrooms! Two large facilities with flush toilets, toilet paper, and—something we’ve never witnessed except in a few posh hotels—paper towels by the lavatories! The charge is now 20 pesewas, which represents a 1000% increase, but it’s worth it. The students got to know this rest stop very well: we made four stops there in all, in each direction on our Northern and our Ashanti Region trips. If they made a ranked list of “toilet facilities in Ghana” it would be at the top, I’m sure. And you don’t want to hear about what would be at the bottom.

Not much to say about the remainder of the bus trip except that it went on and on and on, with many short stretches of potholed and rutted road but nothing close to the chaos we had already come through. Night fell as we drove through Tamale, the trade center of the North, and on to the small town of Yendi, our first destination. We were all thoroughly tired of the bus by then, getting a little cranky, when our attention was suddenly riveted on an amazing show unfolding outside: a light rain began to fall, clouds rolled in, and we found ourselves in the middle of one of the most spectacular lightning displays I have ever seen. Some bolts illuminated vast tracts of clouds, others snaked down from zenith to horizon, others darted across the sky horizontally in brilliant, jagged forks. We looked left and looked right, hoping to catch the next display, and when it came gasps went up from the entire bus. The storms were still rather distant, and with windows closed we did not hear the thunder, til suddenly a great rumble seemed to roll right over our heads. Then the rain came more and more heavily—unseasonably, since the single rainy season in the North usually runs from May to early September—and we saw no more lightning bolts, only repeated flashes of blinding brightness. We were glad now that our trip had lasted so long: if we had been inside our hotel we’d have missed the show entirely.

David's busy month

More than a month has passed since I last wrote anything for the blog, a month with so many demands on my time that Susan has done all the picture organizing and blog postings. Some of these demands were anticipated, and were rewarding in every way: having 2011 director Stephanie Sandberg with us as a houseguest for ten days, for example; and planning and setting out on our Ashanti Region field trip. (It’s going to be a great program next year, and we had a wonderful time laying plans with Stephanie—we only wish we could all three be here together next year!) Others were unanticipated and less enjoyable, such as attending to a student who came down very suddenly with the most severe case of malaria we have ever seen in any of the groups we have brought to Africa. She spent four nights in the hospital, and it’s only now, nearly three weeks after the initial crisis, that she is getting back to her full strength. And this is someone who is hardly ever sick, very attentive to hygiene and food safety, faithful in taking her prophylaxis, and probably more widely traveled than anyone else in the group, including Susan and me. There has been no rational pattern to our several serious illnesses!

But this is the week when we allow the students to organize their own travels in small groups, so I suddenly find myself with some time for other matters besides class prep and grading essays and program planning—and nobody is ill just now either, thank God. We had grand plans of making a visit to Dakar or Bamako or Ouagadougou, in Senegal, Mali, and Burkina Faso, respectively, to experience the world of l’Afrique francophone. But airfares are outrageous: $1100 to $1300 round trip for any of these one- or two-hour flights, the same as flights to Europe. Way beyond our budget. So we’ve pared down to a two-day drive back to the Volta Region on Thursday and Friday.

Half the students are off having adventures: some of them braved the 12+ hour bus rides and returned to the North to volunteer or explore, others are chilling out at beaches and small coastal towns in the Western region. The other half stayed home for part of the week and are heading out tomorrow for the West-except two who decided they will do all their exploring in and around Accra. At our weekly dinner last night we could all sit in the living room together and chat, much less crowded than usual. We borrowed a projector and showed several recent slide shows (the same albums recently posted here, plus the Northern trip I will post later today).

Our time together here is nearly at an end.  On November 22  Susan will leave Ghana and land in Philadelphia for a visit with Klaas and Krista and our anticipated granddaughter. The students and I will remain for two more weeks. But everyone is now aware of the shortness of time remaining. Some of the plans we made, especially those for extensive visits to a village in the Ga District, are clearly not going to be fulfilled this year, though we are still trying to revive some elements of the plan. Other plans have been more than fulfilled, as students have fanned out on free days to visit the homes of friends they have made in the hostel or in the markets, for cooking lessons and wedding celebrations and shopping expeditions. Whether the homestay we scheduled for October will still happen next week is still uncertain—I hope to learn more today—but frustrations over this part of the program have been more than outweighed by all the things that have been even richer and more valuable experiences than anticipated, including each of our field trips.

More of my time this week is bound to mean more of yours, faithful readers: you will now have to endure my prolixity, in contrast with Susan’s conciseness. Deal with it.

Kumasi trip photos (album)

Kumasi trip photos

Odwira festival (album)

Odwira

Odwira festival (Picasaweb slideshow)

Kumasi: Commerce, Congestion, Crafts

Our last big excursion with our students was this past Thursday through Saturday. We travelled to Kumasi, which has been the center of trade in West Africa for centuries. One of the highlights of the trip was the hours we spent in the Kejetia market in the center of town, winding our way through multitudes of shoppers and workers, along rows of market stalls selling food, cloth, shoes made on the premises, used clothing, housewares, hardware, rope, etc.  Our first purchase was a length of green rope for a clothes line.  Our last was sunglasses for David.  In between, we bought cloth and more cloth, mostly batik.  Our hotel was only about 3 blocks from the market and was in a neighborhood full of commerce, with shoes spread out on parked cars and merchandise like sunglasses arrayed on boards.  In Kumasi the vendors won't let you walk away if you don't like their first price.  Shopping is a conversation, with lots of humor involved, and the interaction matters as much as the sale.

We also spent time in the center of Kumasi learning about its history by visiting the palace of the Asantahene, the traditional king of the Asante people, and the military museum.  The Asante are a pretty fierce bunch and brag of defeating the Italians in Ethiopia and the Japanese in Burma during WWII.  

Our third focus was on traditional crafts, with visits to several villages that broke up our arduous trip north—on the main highway linking the two largest cities in Ghana, which right now does not deserve the name “highway.”  There are about 20 kilometers of the worst road construction we’ve encountered this time in Ghana:  we were on dirt tracks through a blast zone with huge rocks on both sides, and another section felt like driving through a gigantic gravel pit, with 2 story high piles of gravel partially blocking what remains of the road.  Even on the smoothly paved sections we were nearly forced onto the shoulder by overloaded trucks coming right at us:  the highway is two lanes wide at best, and often there are large chunks of asphalt missing on the sides. 

As we approached Kumasi, we left the main road to visit three villages where beads and crafts were made.  The artisans in these villages originally produced goods for Asante royalty and continue to create work to high standards.  My favorite was the first village, Abompe, where we learned bauxite bead making by following a guide down narrow paths from home to home, visiting bead makers and polishers.  Bauxite—the mineral from which aluminum is made—was reportedly found by a hunter in the hills nearby more than a century ago, and villagers still make twice-weekly treks on foot to dig it up.  In that village, we also visited a compound where several young men have a workshop making bamboo bike frames.  We had no idea before we arrived that bamboo bike making was a cottage industry in rural Ghana!  As I expected, David is now looking into getting a bamboo frame in his size that he can ship home.  We also watched cloth being made in small villages near Kumasi.  The next day we spent two and a half hours at the National Cultural Center in Kumasi, where several different crafts were being demonstrated by artists who have workshops on the grounds and produce work for sale and on commission. Most of the artists we met were working on large orders to be shipped off to customers, in Ghana or abroad, and there was little pressure to buy.

On our return to Legon, we avoided the worst stretch of road by taking an alternate route, but then ran into horrible traffic through Adenta and Madina, in our last 20 km or so.   When we finally arrived on campus about 7:30, we dropped the students at the dorm, changed our clothes, and immediately headed down into Accra for a concert featuring Adja Koo Nimo, one of the greatest figures of traditional high-life, and George Darko, a more contemporary musician who leads a terrific dance band.   It was a great way to top off the visit by next year’s Calvin in Ghana program, Stephanie Sandberg. I think she got a good overview of the work involved and the good times available here.

As of today, I have only two weeks left in Ghana, which does not seem long enough for all the things I want to do.  We are thinking that we will not do much traveling during our free time but instead spend a little time up on the ridge, relaxing in Akropong, and some time getting things organized and packed up here, so that David will not have too much to do on his own in the two weeks that remain before he and the students depart.  It will be hard to leave, but worth it, since I am leaving early in anticipation of the birth of our first grandchild in Philadelphia.

A festival of reconciliation complicated by political strife

From September 28 through October 1, the students and I (Susan) moved up to Akropong to observe the rituals, pageantry, and politics of the Odwira Festival. We settled into rooms at the Akrofi-Christeler Institute (ACI), which served as our base for observations and our retreat center, for reflection and quiet time.  Lectures by a representative of the paramount chief and by ACI staff members helped the students observe and understand what was going on.  David stayed at Legon until Thursday morning to attend the Nkrumah Centenary Symposium at the University of Ghana, an academic gathering sponsored by CODESRIA, a leading pan-African social science organization headquartered in Dakar, Senegal. 

This was my third time observing the Odwira festival and I learned a lot more this time about the complexity of this tradition and also experienced the impact a raging political dispute had on the festival.  The beginning of the celebration of Odwira in Akropong can be dated precisely:  in 1826, in one of many battles between the Ashanti kingdom and Akuapem challengers, fighters from Akuapem located a forest camp where the most powerful Ashanti relics were being held, poisoned the guards (and overpowered one woman/priestess who hadn’t eaten the poisoned food), and stole two objects that both sides believed had driven the conquests of the Ashanti army:  the odosu  and the mpomponsu.   The odosu is reputedly a basin containing the skulls of the enemies.  The mpomponsu is a hat with horns on the top and two tails at the back containing the oboaman, powerful medicine that protects the life of the chief.   The mpomponsu is brought out for public display, worn by a young boy sitting in front of the paramount chief in the chief’s palanquin or on state occasions.  The odosu is never seen by the public.  The old woman captured with the objects told the Akuapem that, now that they had the odosu, they had to perform the Odwira yearly so that the odosu would protect them from harm and evil. 

We heard this account from our discussion leader, the Rev. Ernestina Afriyie, who is on the faculty of the ACI and has been studying the Odwira festival for several years.  Ernestina was our main lecturer in 2005 as well, and at that time she had moved from the idea that the Odwira festival was antithetical to Christianity to the position that its focus on atonement, purification reconciliation brought it close to key Christian themes.  Now that she has a better understanding of the odosu she has a deeper understanding of the complex themes that need to be addressed.  She said that ACI is continuing to focus on converting the Odwira to a Christian celebration, not by condemning it but by showing that the covenant of protection between the odosu and Akropong has been replaced by Christ’s new covenant and that it is through Christ that we experience true atonement, purification and reconciliation.

The Akuapem state secretary, Mr. Bekoe, gave us an official introduction to the festival.  He described the meaning of Odwira as purification and reintegration of the community to forge forward for the betterment of all.  The festival gathers families together, honors the ancestors, calls for the resolution of disputes, and celebrates the community.  Mr. Bekoe described the various rules and rituals as much more social-political than religious.  He said that the 6 week ban on eating yams before the festival was practical—after yams reached their full size, they needed time to mature, and without a religious prohibition people would not leave them alone.  The ban on drumming and funerals gave the chiefs a rest.  He emphasized that Akropong was 85% Christian and said that, with a proper understanding, you could be a Christian and a traditionalist.  Mr Bekoe never mentioned the odosu.  He said that the curfew on Thursday was for the purpose of washing stools but, according to Ernestina, it is then that the odosu is carried around town to absorb all the evil in the area and bestow protection.  The odosu is then washed in a stream reserved for washing widows and ridding things of evil and death.  The official program of the 2010 Akuapem Odwira states that curfew is imposed for the performance of the “adoration ceremony of ‘Odosu’ by the traditional executioners” but does not explain what the odosu is.  

This year there was a lot of trouble behind the scenes in Akropong, as we first learned on Tuesday from Michael Ayensah, who met us along the road about half way from Accra to Akropong at the Aburi wood carving village.  He said that everything was starting much later than usual and that he was late meeting us because he had gone to the paramount chief’s palace to learn what was happening.  Michael reported that one of the sub-chiefs, the Banmuhene, was upset because his choice for Queen Mother had not been approved and the council of elders was preparing to enstool their choice.  A Queen Mother in a stool house is always a female relative of the chief, but not the wife or sister.  The Banmuhene has been adamant that (after the previous queen passed away several years ago) his sister, who lives in the US and has been very generous to him and to the town, should occupy the stool.  The elders selected another relative, following traditional guidelines for succession, and had begun the enstooling process.  The Banmuhene, who is the “chief executioner” and head of the chief’s security guard, is critical to the Odwira festival.  He must give permission for each event of the festival to begin. 

The dispute erupted Tuesday morning at the “outdooring” of the new yam.  Afterward, the Banmuhene displayed his displeasure by parading through the main street with his cloth at his waist, bare-chested, brandishing a cutlass in one hand and a pistol in the other.  (On ceremonial occasions chiefs wear 12 yards of cloth, wrapped around the body toga style, with one shoulder bare.)  There was some talk that he had pushed things too far and would, perhaps, be destooled. 

After the “outdooring” of the new yam, the next event in the festival was to be the coming of the odwira to the paramount chief’s palace.  No one could explain clearly what the odwira was or what it would look like.  The closest we could come is that it a spiritual essence that is carried in a small calabash bowl.  It is obtained from a shrine in the forest where the Akwapem people first settled.  A group of men were to depart for the forest right after the outdooring, but they did not leave town until late afternoon and the ceremony that was supposed to occur around 3 or 4 took place from about 7:30 to 9 pm.   We had chairs inside the palace, on the left side half way between the drummers and the chief’s umbrella and chair.  When we arrived, there was a bank of the huge fontomfron drums being played.  The drumming stopped.  A group of linguists huddled to discuss where chiefs would sit.  People wandered around with pillows for the chiefs’ chairs (some plastic stacking chairs, others elaborately carved).   The drums started again, playing for individuals who performed praise dances.  Sub-subchiefs arrived and more individuals performing praise dances.  We all rose as the sub-chiefs came in.  The paramount chief, who is ill, sent a representative who sat in a chair placed in front of the paramount chief’s chair.  The representative was a tall man who appeared to be in his 30s or 40s, very solemn, dressed in a black cloth.

We heard rumors that the Odriwa was coming.  More drumming and praise dances.  Then a cluster of men in shabby smocks and with dirt in their hair accompanied an old man carrying a red cloth.  The old man staggered and seemed to be fainting.  Someone poured schnapps at his feet while another took the cloth from him and brought it forward.  Lots of men in dirty smocks crowded on the floor in the center.  Several had leaves or branches in their mouths.  Some drummed on drums they carried.  Some shot guns.  (There is a roof over the seating areas on the four sides of the rectangular pavilion, but the center is open to the sky.)  A second cloth was brought.  More ear-splitting gunshots.  The cloth was stretched around a small group of chiefs, including the paramount chief’s representative as a tall man with a brown hat carrying a calabash bowl (the Banmuhene) entered the center.  He seemed to need to be persuaded to bring the calabash forward.  Around him, the men argued, shoved each other, brandished fists, fought over guns, and shot off guns.  As the cloths was pulled together to enclose the paramount chief’s representative, tensions were high, but by the time the cloths were parted, there was joviality, with people shaking hands and patting each other on the back.  More praise dancing, lots of drumming.  The Banmuhene went up and sat on the lap of the paramount chief’s representative at the conclusion of his dance.  As we learned later, he was saying that he was ready to lay down his life for the paramount chief and despite their disagreement; he did not mean to disgrace him.

Many of the spectators left when the Banmuhene left, but we stayed to see how the ceremony concluded.  Another group of men in smocks came in, offered prayers and poured libations.  There was more handshaking and then the chiefs filed out.  By then it was after 9 pm.  That night and the following day were designated as a time of mourning and remembering the dead.  I turned in early.

The next morning Mr. Bekoe gave us an overview of the festival.  In the afternoon, we met with Ernestina, learned about the odosu, had a debriefing on what we had seen the night before, and then the students got their assignments of where they were to stand and observe the ceremony of the feeding of the ancestors on Thursday.  We walked through town in the late afternoon.  While most of the people we saw were wearing dark cloth for mourning, the atmosphere felt more like a family reunion than a funeral.  Later we heard rumors that the Banmuhene, who is an army officer, brought some of his army buddies up from Accra, and there had been some injuries from the incessant discharge of firearms—not deliberate attacks, but too-careless discharge of guns that harmed bystanders.  We appreciated our home base close enough to the action that we could hear the summoning drums but were well away from the gunshots.

Wednesday night a curfew was imposed for the washing of the black stools (memorial stools handed down from ancestors).  We were instructed to be inside with lights off by 10.  Drumming pounded and loud speakers blared until about midnight but everything then fell eerily silent and the outside lights around the ACI were extinguished.  I was housed in ACI’s old guesthouse rather than the dorm and my screened porch overlooked the road down which the stools would be carried.  I extinguished my lights when the music stopped and then looked out the porch and realized that I could stand in the deep shadow of the door.  There were some lights shining directly across from the guesthouse at the Presbyterian Teachers College, which takes the position that the Odwira is a pagan ceremony in which they take no part, going so far as to ignore the ban on eating yams and on drumming. 

Standing in the shadow, I heard gunshots and then a phalanx of men came into view, surrounding a pair carrying large wash basins and stools on their heads.  They marched past and returned up the hill from the stream in less than 10 minutes.  After a while, a second group passed, warning people away with bells rather than gun shots.   The third group shot guns and passed at a run—very intense.  The fourth group took a different route to the stream.  I heard the gunshots but no one passed the guesthouse.  By then it was after 1:30 am and I headed to bed.  A few weeks later, I told a friend who has lived in Akropong that I watched and he said it was good that they did not see me.  If they met someone, he cautioned, they would beat them, perhaps not with the intent to kill, but they would leave the person for dead.

On Thursday, there was a late start again for the days main event--the feeding of the ancestors, in which the stool house families send entranced young women (and a few young men) to a shrine on the edge of town carrying food.  I spent some time in the paramount chief’s palace, watching new chiefs be presented.  The first couple of chiefs came with small entourages and only a few gifts, but the chiefs apparently increased in importance or wealth, because the amount of goods (schnapps, cases of beer, cloth, goats, yams, and envelopes of money) accompanying the new chiefs increased each tome a new group appeared before the paramount chief’s representative.  The last group came in with a huge entourage, shooting many guns, and we were glad to head back to lunch.

We heard that the Banmuhene went ahead with an enstoolment ceremony, making his absent sister a Queen Mother.  The elders say he did nothing of the sort—he is not authorized to appoint a queen on his own.  But with this act, he allowed the rest of the festival to proceed and the food bearers to head out toward a shrine called Nsorem on the edge of town.  They are dressed in white cloth, dusted with talc, surrounded by bodyguards who are charged with preventing them from falling or dropping the food, and followed by an umbrella bearer and drummers. There was a sizable police presence among the spectators on the street and young men carrying guns were being questioned.  Everything went off without injuries and the town seemed more relaxed, despite the press of the crowds watching the procession of food bearers and despite the fact that the women from the Banmuhene’s house were accompanied by a rowdy gang of young men, shouting and firing off guns and generally misbehaving.  The procession was supposed to start in the early afternoon and end by 5 pm, but it did not begin until 4 pm and went past nightfall. 

On Thursday night, David and I found a spot in an alley where a bar had hired a good band, playing Ghanaian highlife music--which evolved out of big bands, jazz and African music--and the people welcomed us warmly.  

On Friday there was a durbar (a gathering of traditional and political leaders) in the central square, preceded by a parade down the main street in which many of the chiefs and queen mothers ride in palanquins carried on the heads of young men. The only hitch at the durbar was that the leader of the political party that is now in the minority, the NPP, arrived at the durbar after the representative of the ruling party, the NDP, and was told that, because he was late, he would not be permitted to take the time to shake hands with all the dignitaries lining the durbar grounds.  We were sitting in the midst of his supporters who set up a great hue and cry.  The NDP prevailed, the police kept the crowd in good order, and the durbar did not go on as long as we had anticipated.

We returned on Friday night to the alley with the highlife band and friends and students joined us.  It was great to listen to good music and dance after such intense days.

Volta Region photos (Picasaweb album)

Mountains and Monkeys

On September 17 and 18 we headed out on a bus trip up to Akosombo (where our daughter Janna taught school in 2005-2006) and northeast into the Volta region.  The Volta region was part of the German colony of Togoland until after World War I, when it was split between France and Britain.  Michael Ayenseh and his two children Nana Adwoa (11) and Paa Kwesi (6), our grad student assistant Samuel Abokyi and another grad student, Peter , joined us and our 16 Calvin students.

 

We stopped first at the Volta River Authority offices in Akosombo and arranged for a tour of the dam.  The tour consists of a walk on top of the dam, with explanations by the guide about the construction of the dam (it was finished in 1961), the formation of the lake (the largest man-made lake in the world), the amount of power produced, etc.  (This was Nkrumah’s biggest project and illustrates both his vision and naivety).  Peter, whose dissertation is on the family structures of migrant fishermen’s families in Dzemeni, a fishing village on Lake Volta (pronounced Gemeny), supplemented the official guide with information on the sociological and political implications of the dam project, which silted up the lower part of the Volta River and inundated many villages above the dam. 

We ate packed lunches of jollof rice and chicken as we crossed the Volta. After about 45 minutes of driving past groves of plantain and banana, and grass taller than our heads, we stopped on the outskirts of town at the Dzemeni medical clinic for a pit stop.  Several of the students took the opportunity to speak with the midwife, admire a month old baby, and view the delivery room.  Peter continued his commentary when we arrived in the center of Dzemeni.  Peter described how the town grew as fishermen on the lower Volta River moved north because they could no longer support themselves in their home villages after the dam was built.  Now they are finding they must travel further and further up into Lake Volta to catch fish and many of them are returning to their wives and families infrequently, some never. 

As we approached the lake, we encountered a woman who has prospered in the generally poor town.  She owns 24 fishing boats and she described a new practice that she has just started, which is to go out in a motor boat to her boats and pick up the fish so that the boats do not have to make the journey back.  Due to heavy rain in the north and the release of water from a dam in Burkina Faso, part of the market area of Dzemeni was under water.  Having just seen the high water mark on the dam and heard the guide say that they anticipated reaching it and sending water over the spillway this year, it was clear that a lot more of Dzemeni would soon be reclaimed by Lake Volta.

We then traveled to the kente cloth weaving village of Kpetoe Agotime. As our students watched the weavers, we began negotiating for stoles which will be presented to the students at the final dinner. The initial asking price was GH 15.  Samuel told us that last year the price was 10.  I went to work to get the price down and we ended up at 13 per stole.  Then we went to the “office” building next to the weavers, where the receipt book had only a few entries between our order and the one Calvin placed the year before.  It turned out that last year’s price was 18!  We will “dash” the weaver something extra when we get the finished work to assuage our sense of guilt.  We were happy to have Peter along to conduct the negotiations in Ewe, since the head weaver could not communicate in English or Twi beyond a few phrases. 

We spent the night in Ho and arrived at Freedom Hotel about 6:00 pm. For dinner, most of the students hit the street to scrounge up food.  One group went with Michael and put together a real feast, but others made do with bread and Milo (an instant drink powder, like Ovaltine).  We ate a good meal at the Freedom Hotel restaurant, on the roof-top patio, and then enjoyed a swim in their pool.

The next morning we headed further into the hills.  It took more than 2 hours to drive to Wli Falls, which is right on the border with Togo. As we approached the falls, the hills got taller and finally the ribbon of waterfall came into view.  We found the area around the trail head at the park headquarters much more developed than it was 5 years ago, with several booths selling artisan made jewelry and batik cloth.  We hiked to the falls through dense rain forest, following a trail with seven bridges crossing streams. The trail was in a lot better shape than it had been in 2005 and the forest just as beautiful.  Because of all the rain we’ve had, the falls were pounding down in a torrent.  Just after we arrived, it started to rain again.  Most of the group changed into suits or simply swam in their already wet clothes.   When the rain finally let up, we hiked back down and went to the Waterfall Heights restaurant for lunch.  

By the time we got back on the bus after lunch, it was 3 pm.  Our final stop was the Tafi Atome Monkey Sanctuary.  The village traditionally did not hunt the local monkeys because their oral history about the origins of the settlement identifies the monkeys as protectors who warned of danger and brought them success in battle.  Peace Corps volunteers helped the village develop as a community-based eco-tourism site after the population of monkeys had dwindled.  The village has carried on and it is now doing a great job of conserving wildlife, which is rare in Ghana.   We arrived about 5 pm and were led to a spot at the edge of the village where we encountered one of four groups of mona monkeys that live near the village. Our guide gave us all bananas to feed them and instructed us to hold firmly to the stem end.  Most of the monkeys approached timidly, nimbly peeled the banana, grabbed a hunk, and scampered away.  The head monkey was bolder and grabbed several whole bananas by intimidating those holding them out into letting go. 

It was after dark by the time we arrived back at the main road where 4 of our students disembarked to head back north for another day of hiking.  It was hard to see them disappear into the night, but as is so typical in Ghana, they were immediately approached by people who helped them get transportation to their destination.

 

All told, the trip was a good combination of education about culture and development and immersion in lush, green countryside—a welcome change from congested Accra.

Harvest festivals and a guitar festival

This is an entry I started writing up a long time ago, in the last week of August just before Susan’s arrival, and never finished. Some of the events were quite interesting, so I’m going to post it now despite the long delay.

The major annual festival of the Ga people, who came to the Accra region before European contact and are still the most numerous here, marks the harvesting of the first new yams. It is called “Homowo,” which means “hooting at hunger.” By tradition it is celebrated first in Jamestown, the oldest Ga settlement and one of the poorest areas of Accra, and later in other neighborhoods and towns and villages. The 16 Calvin students and I saw the processions of chiefs and warriors forming in the streets of Jamestown from our bus windows on our orientation tour of Accra, just a few days after the students arrived. We also saw large numbers of police and soldiers stationed around the neighborhood in case of trouble. High population density, pervasive poverty, and disputes over land and leadership have often turned celebrative crowds into rioting mobs in Jamestown. Fortunately nothing of the sort happened this year.

Our second Homowo was a huge gathering at Amasaman, administrative seat of the Ga West district, where we were seated as honored guests near the dais for visiting dignitaries and were filmed by Ghana Broadcasting cameras—the only white faces among many thousands attending. The guest of honor was Vice President John Dramani Mahama, who shook some of the students’ hands when he greeted the crowd and gave a speech—reported on later in the newspaper—calling on traditional authorities to resolve their differences, settle disputes over succession, and work to help their communities. He noted that neither presidents nor vice presidents had been willing to speak at Homowo gatherings for many years because of the frequent outbreaks of conflict, but he commended the Ga Districts as a commendable exception.

While waiting several hours for events to get underway, in between rainshowers, we were invited to the courtyard of the chief’s palace. There we watched—and then helped—a crowd of local women prepare the special festival food, kpoikpoi, which is made from ground maize and cassava with some palm oil and peppers, all pounded in a large mortar. Before everyone gathered at a central square for the “durbar of chiefs,” the chief of the local community had led a procession to every corner of his village, conveying new year greetings and scattering kpoikpoi on the ground in front of every dwelling with a blessing on its residents. He was accompanied by a noisy throng of dancers, drummers, and a small brass band, but we were sitting inside and weren’t told what was going on, so we just heard the commotion from a distance. After the procession returned and all the speeches were finished we were invited to “lunch” (at 4 pm) at the official residence of the mayor (“Municipal Chief Executive” is his formal title). It was a lavish feast of a dozen or more dishes. Also invited were the mayor’s staff and extended family and friends and a crowd of police who had been on duty—nearly a hundred people in all. The location was the lovely and spacious home in expansive grounds that once housed the British District Commissioner, the same house where our Sister Cities delegation was entertained in August 2004.

Several of the senior police officers went out of their way to welcome the Calvin students—the female ones, at least. One extended an invitation to travel with him for a week, and was rather evasive when the student asked whether his wife would object. She asked a Ghanaian who had accompanied us to come and rescue her, but (so she reports) he just sat at some distance and enjoyed the spectacle of a 19 year old American fighting off the advances of a somewhat inebriated 60 year old police officer.

At Daniel Sackey’s invitation, two of the Calvin students and I attended another Homowo event a week later. We arrived about 10:30 and greeted the paramount chief of the village of Ashiaman. It was nothing like our meeting with the chief in Adenkrobe, who sat with great dignity, wearing traditional cloth, and spoke only in Ga to his elders and never directly to us, and we were never invited to shake his hand (except one student after she closed the meeting with prayer). The Ashiaman chief was seated on his stool when we arrived, with four or five of his elders around him—that much was the same. But he was wearing a polo shirt and a baggy pair of waxcloth shorts. He stood up and welcomed us in English, with a handshake, then excused himself to take a cell phone call and get things organized for the ceremonies.

We had been assured that the major events would be finished by 1:00 pm, but in fact that was when things got underway. The senior elder—the kingmaker who is allowed to sit on the chief's stool and assists in his installation—invited us in to "take kpokpoi" while we were waiting, and we were each served a big bowl of the traditional Homowo food, whose consistency is somewhat like couscous, with fish stew, a rich, spicy dark sauce in which there was the front or back half of a smoked fish and a gristly piece of goat.

Just as we finished the official arrival of the chief--now formally dressed in a red cloth with a ceremonial hat--was announced by drummers. Huge basins of dry kpokpoi and tureens of fish stew were arranged in front of the stool. The kingmaker sat there and mixed them together, threw some on the ground for the ancestors, and tasted the stew to assure the chief that it was not poisoned. Now things got really noisy and frantic. A large group of women came dancing and shouting out of the house, and the chief took off on a fast-paced tour of every corner of the village, throwing kpokpoi on the ground and pouring an occasional libation of schnapps. Following behind were drummers and a—well, I guess we can’t call one trumpet player a brass band, but he did his part.

There were also a couple of dozen policemen on hand. It’s a little unnerving when a man cradling an AK-47 in his arms greets you with a big smile and bids you welcome—that’s what happened over and over as I followed the procession and snapped photos. And there was a flare-up this time: as I was passing one large compound at the back of the crowd, well behind the chief, young men were yelling at each other, then swinging sticks, then throwing stones. I got hit by a couple of small stones, and other villagers hustled me quickly behind a building out of range. Nobody could tell me what was going on, except that young men like to make trouble sometimes.

Two days later I learned more from the newspaper. Trouble had broken out when the chief blessed the ground at the compound of an older man who believes he is the rightful chief of the town and despises the younger usurper whom the elders have enstooled. Young men from his family not only threw stones, as I had observed, but attacked members of the chief’s party with machetes, sending several people to the hospital with serious injuries. Indeed, the potential for conflict was so high that the sitting chief had been forbidden to hold any public Homowo events. He had been told to mark the event only inside his own compound.

Two things still amaze me about this. First, the disputed enstoolment did not take place last week, or last month, but ten years ago. The conflict has festered for a decade, with two hostile camps living side by side in a small village in greater Accra. Second, I’m astonished that our Ga District contacts invited us to attend what was in effect an illegal festival celebration, mentioning nothing about the simmering conflict. We were never in any real danger, to be sure. But it was disturbing to read in the newspaper how the police responded when scuffling broke out: by running away.

We didn’t stay for the durbar or any of the speeches, but even so we returned to campus two hours later than planned, just in time to depart again for a a "guitar festival" at which two of the great figures of Ghanaian popular music, Koo Nimo and George Darko, were to be featured performers. Susan’s cousin Elizabeth, Jeff and their 6-year-old daughter Cailyn joined me and most of the students at their hostel and we drove together to a private park just 8 km or so from the campus—less than half an hour’s drive if it weren’t for all the sections of road that have been torn up by construction projects and turned into rough patches of dirt and mud.

In a lovely wooded park with well-tended flowers and trees and a small stage, a crowd of about 150 Ghanaians and Europeans enjoyed a marvellous potpourri of the best Ghanaian pop, not just highlife but also reggae and jazz and traditional music (seprewa and one-string bow and balaphone--but juiced up with some pop elements). Adja Koo Nimo is over 70 now and performs infrequently, but he brought his Traditional Music Ensemble all the way from Kumasi to perform. He still has a lot of red-hot guitar licks, which he now intersperses with brief comments drawing on traditional proverbs and songs to put highlife music in context. I sat with Esi Sutherland and introduced her to Jeff and Elizabeth and the students. (She was our literature instructor in 2004 and 2005, a former government minister and a major figure in Ghanaian literary life.) Koo Nimo gave a warm tribute to Esi’s mother Efua as his teacher and collaborator for the last 15 years of her life, and he dedicated his next song to Esi, who said, "Excuse me, David, but since he has honored me I must go and dance."

George Darko, a more recent figure who offers a more pop-flavored highlife style, got the whole crowd out of their seats to dance when he closed out the show. He’s no young man either—perhaps in his late 50s—but both he and Koo Nimoo have filled out their bands with very talented young musicians, perpetuating the more relaxed and danceable pop styles that predate today’s heavily electrified and synthesizer-driven “hiplife” and “raga.”

Most of the Calvin women students were quickly claimed by Ghanaian partners, some of them musicians from the bands that had just left the stage. They wasted no time declaring their intent: "We should get married and have children together." The Calvin women tried not to give out their cell phone numbers, but one let down her guard. We wondered how long it would take til she got a call to say “I miss you and I want to see you again soon.” The answer: about 15 minutes.

Before Elizabeth and Jeff and Cailyn had to leave to pick Margaret at her friend’s house I asked Cailyn if I could have her last dance. All four of us ended up on the dance floor having a grand time, Cailyn mostly dancing up on my shoulders. A moment later a slender young man came up and greeted me. "Hello Prof! I am happy that you are back in Ghana. When did you arrive?" It was Aaron Bebe Sakura, the seprewa virtuoso (whom Janna has met at LEAF in North Carolina). He is teaching at the university again, and we agreed to meet there later. I want to be sure the students have a chance to hear him and John Collins perform with the Local Dimension Palm Wine Band.

Sunday (29 August) was, at last, a day of rest, when all that was on my schedule was going to church, welcoming our dear friend Abraham N'gan'ga who will spend the afternoon with me before flying home to London, and preparing some sort of supper (without a stove, since it still isn’t working) for all of the students, who will come to my flat from 5 to 7. I haven't had more than a half-day free since I arrived nearly three weeks ago, and I've been putting in workdays that start at 7 and end about 11, but it's all paying off so well that I don't mind a bit.

There are so many ways in which Ghana 2010 has achieved what Susan and I worked very hard to put in place in 04 and 05! Several of the things we introduced for the first time—traveling to Wli Falls and other sites in the Volta region, commissioning graduation stoles, visiting Ga District communities, visiting both Moslem and Christian NGO’s in the North, arranging conversations with imams and mallams as well as Christian pastors—have become regular parts of the program each year. Samuel Ntewusu, who has been involved with the program to some extent each year from its beginning in 2002, told a colleague at the university the other day, "Calvin's program was at the brink of extinction when Prof came in 2004 and built it back up again." It’s kind of him to say but gives Susan and me far too much credit. We were able to set some changes in motion that others have carried through, greatly enhancing the quality of instruction and the richness of the students’ experience.

Coastal forts and festivals

The first of our field trips to the various regions of Ghana took place on 3-4 September, when we traveled to Anomabu, Cape Coast, and Elmina on the Gulf of Guinea coast. Everyone was ready to depart at 7 as requested—except one student who overslept and delayed us an hour. He will be getting a 6 am call every time we have an early departure from now on. (Actually—from the perspective of another month of trips—the general pattern is that someone keeps 17 other people waiting for 30 to 60 minutes, but it’s a different person each time.)

Our first stop was at Anomabu, a small fishing village about 30 km west of the town of Cape Coast, reachable in less than two hours from Accra now that the road is finished. (It was in dreadful condition in 2004 and 2005—Chinese contractors were rebuilding the main highway and simply diverted the traffic onto rough dirt tracks along half its length.) The reason for the stop was to see an archeological project being directed by Kofi Agorsah, a Ghanaian teaching at Portland State University. True, neither of us had ever met the man. But he was warmly recommended by our mutual friend Marvin Kaiser, a dean at PSU, and we’d exchanged a number of emails and phone calls. “Stop in at Fort William on Saturday morning for half an hour and we will show you what the students are working on,” he said.

Fort William is one of the larger coastal forts in the Central Region, but when we last visited Anomabu it was boarded up. In its past, after the end of the slave trade, were periods of use as military base, storage depot, and prison, but it has stood empty for several decades after the prison was closed. We made a special stop at Anomabu in 2005 to photograph its amazing variety of posuban shrines, depots for the town’s military companies that have become giant public sculptures. There were plans afoot then to open the fort as a tourist site, and this happened in 2008. When we arrived, Kofi welcomed us warmly and turned us over to Philip, curator of the site, who gave us a fascinating and deeply disturbing hour-long tour. Although this is far smaller than the better-known forts at Cape Coast and Elmina (these two are often called “castles”), it was actually the busiest transit point for slaves. Those taken from nearby Kormantsin gained a reputation as the strongest and most robust of all the plantation slaves from the entire Guinea coast, and demand was always high.

Very little has been done to restore Fort William, in sharp contrast with the other two sites. We stood in a large room with two concrete counters. They were added when it was the prison kitchen, Philip explained, but originally it was a room where slaves underwent a physical and medical examination to assess their condition and market potential, while the officers looked on. He gave no sordid details, just left us to imagine the moral and spiritual state of a physician who would carry out such an outrageous affront to human dignity in order to arrive at an appropriate cash value for a man, woman, or child.

As at the other sites, we were taken into men’s and women’s dungeons, neither of them very large, and shown the “room of no return” from which a small exit door led to the loading dock for small rowboats that would carry slaves out to ships waiting at anchor. In one room was a surprising array of monochrome drawing and diagrams on the ceiling. Prisoners kept in this cell in the early 20^th century had made these designs with the soot from candle flames, Philip told us, holding each other on their shoulders to reach the stone surface above. At the center was a graceful and serene woman’s face. This cell had reasonably good air and light through overhead openings.

Another cell, back in a dark corner of the fort, had only one small opening high overhead. This was where stubborn or rebellious male slaves were held, said Philip. Each day a small quantity of food, far less than a full ration, was tossed down on their heads from the high window, and the men had to claw at each other to get a share. There was no corresponding cell for women, but Philip described in sickening detail their exploitation as sexual partners by the fort’s governor and officers. The women selected for such abuse hoped desperately to become pregnant, he said, because it was a common practice to release female slaves who gave birth to mixed-race babies and set them up as officers’ concubines in the town.

This all took more than an hour, and it was all the more shocking because we were expecting nothing more than a quick briefing on the archeological dig. And that is indeed what followed. Kofi and an American colleague told us about the site where they have been digging for several years. It is in the oldest part of Kormantsie, where the British first settled along the coast in the early 18^th century. They have found rich deposits of broken pottery, local and imported beads, clay pipes, and other artifacts, and one section that has no European objects is evidently the pre-contact Fante village.

All the artifacts they uncover are labeled and bagged and carried to Fort William, where a they are washed and brushed clean for further examination by a team of thirty students, mostly from Portland State, a few from other US institutions, and others from Cape Coast University and the University of Ghana. Real archeology, we were reminded, isn’t very much like what Indiana Jones does with a pickaxe and shovel: its most important tool is a toothbrush.

In Ghana for a month or six weeks, the American students are not taking formal classes but are learning a lot. The interaction between Americans and Ghanaians as they worked and chatted with our students was lively and interesting. We knew they were staying in the fort but couldn’t imagine where, til we walked up to the ramparts and saw a row of 15 bright orange and brown backpacking tents lined up there, behind the crenellated stone wall facing the sea. What a unique place to camp!

By now nearly two hours behind schedule, we skipped the castle tour at Cape Coast but stopped for lunch in adjacent restaurant overlooking the rocky coast, and then we continued to Elmina. There we had an excellent guide, Francis, who provided an informative but concise historical background on that incredible edifice, built by the Portuguese ten years before Columbus sailed off to the New World with stone they shipped from Europe, expanded many times since then. Recounting the terrible crimes committed by Portuguese, then Dutch, governors and slave merchants, Francis said repeatedly, “Our purpose is not to instill guilt but simply to remember, so that such crimes will not happen again.” He also talked candidly about the complicity of West African chiefs and their people in keeping the ships supplied with human cargo.

Because the Saturday of our trip would be the climax of the Oguase Fetu Afahye festival in Cape Coast, we were unable to find rooms at any of the hotels Calvin has used in the past. That turned out to be very fortunate: Samuel Abokyi found us accommodations at Brenu Beach Resort, about 20 km beyond Elmina, where we had taken the students for a swim and supper in 2005—but not overnight, since they had only some primitive huts that looked like heaven for mosquitoes and hell for people. Now there are several concrete block cabins with AC and hot water! The rates were high, but they let us put four students in each room. Unfortunately none of the rooms had four beds, as we had been led to believe. But we did scrounge up four mattresses that filled the floor of the guys’ room. The women cheerfully squeezed in next to each other in one big bed.

It had been a very hot and humid day—our short walk through Anomabu nearly knocked us out from heatstroke—and on arrival the students quickly donned swimsuits and headed for the beautiful, spotlessly clean, sandy beach. And into the ocean, which was raging furiously: large, powerful rollers came in one after another, six to eight feet from trough to crest, and pounded away at anything in their path, such as us. Some of the students went no farther than knee deep—and still got knocked down and pummeled by the water. The stronger swimmers (including a certified lifeguard) ventured farther and even tried riding the surf, which felt like diving into a washing machine on the spin cycle. I’ve never felt such powerful masses of water, turning me head over heels, spinning me around, shoving me every which way. While riding one wave I found my head inside a pocket of low air pressure, my cheeks puffing out as the wave pulled me forward and then threw me down. But some of the students soon discovered that if you swam through the breaking waves you could ride high on your back in the dense saltwater and just let the rolling swells lift you up and drop you down again. It was a strange sight to look out from the shore and see several students spread-eagled on a rising wall of water.

I had ordered dinner at Brenu Beach over a very noisy phone connection from Anomabu, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. It turned out to be a sumptuous feast, with two kinds of rice and fresh vegetables and “lobster” (small rock lobster tails) and calamari (a bit too heavily breaded) and a magnificent 10-kilo “cassava fish.” Twenty hungry college students and accompanying adults couldn’t consume more than half the delicious fish. “That was what the fisherman brought me today,” explained the proprietor. Cost of the feast: 15 cedis each, or $10.50, including beverages.

First stop Saturday morning was the famous canopy walk at Kakum National Park—an experience students talk about from year to year, so we can’t skip it. Susan and I were not very happy with the changes since 2005, especially in fees. Then it cost us about $40 for all the students, while the price has now shot up to nearly $200 for the same number of visitors. And we were hurried onto the path toward the forest walk by a guide, Doris, who combined our group with nearly 30 other visitors. When we asked whether she could divide the group she told us no, there were several hundred schoolchildren right behind us and our group of 50 was actually not very large. She didn’t tell us anything about the forest ecosystem, either, but gave only a brief introduction to the construction of the walkway. A huge contrast with 2004 and 2005 when we had a wonderfully well-informed naturalist as a guide—a man who had grown up in the forest nearby and recalled seeing elephants as he walked to school—and were the only group on the site for our first hour. This year the distance—and the magnetic lure of the beach after breakfast—made an early arrival impossible.

All the same, the walkway is a very interesting way to get a view of the many levels of the rainforest. There are five: the undergrowth of herbaceous plants, a thicker layer of shrubs, and three layers of canopy: spreading trees reaching up to about 50 feet, the closed canopy of taller trees at about 120 feet, and the isolated older emergent trees to which the walkways are anchored, some of them 200 feet tall. Visitors traverse seven suspended walkways, securely supported by cables with rope nets along the sides. It is very safe (no one has ever fallen) but rather terrifying, at least the first time. The others in our group graciously let the Calvin group proceed first, and the students mostly enjoyed it immensely, even the one who nearly opted out because of her fear of heights. Her smile looked a bit forced, but she made it to the end.

Kakum has an enormous wealth of wildlife, but we didn’t see any. The forest elephants live far in the northern part of the park, and the antelope and other game stay well hidden. We did hear dozens of different varieties of birds, but (unlike our 2004 and 2005 guide) Doris never mentioned any of them and wasn’t very responsive to questions. But she did give an interesting account of the medicinal uses of various trees (bark, wood, leaves, roots, fruits and seeds) on a forest walk that she conducted after we had finished our aerial adventures. It was amazing to walk past the gigantic trunks and root systems of tall trees whose tops we had just visited—but could not see because of the density of the lower layers. We had decided not to pay the stiff added fee for this, but Dorcas was more than ready to offer the add-on in exchange for a lower fee (we bargained back and forth a while and ended up at about half the ticket price) which went directly into her pocket.

This gave us a snapshot of what’s right and what’s wrong with Ghana’s tourism development efforts. The park is well managed, with few poaching problems and well-maintained paths, and there was not a bit of litter along the trail. Guides are mostly helpful and knowledgeable (we were unlucky this time). But fees keep going higher and higher (25 percent more this year than just last year) and yet there is nothing remotely approaching the experiences that draw crowds to the game parks of East and South Africa. You really can’t expect tourists to pay higher and higher fees to visit game parks in which there is no game to be seen.

But we didn’t complain about this to the students. They had a grand time.

From Kakum we went to a quaint lodge out in the countryside for lunch, Hans Cottage, where crocodiles swim in the pond and great crowds of weaverbirds chatter as they tend to their young in hanging nests in the trees. From experience we knew that service there can be extremely slow, so we had preordered an assortment of meals and were served promptly.

Then we returned to Cape Coast, hoping to find a good spot to park the bus and observe the festival procession—the most famous in Ghana. There are large numbers of chiefs and queen mothers carried overhead in palanquins and royal chairs, praise dancers and asafo companies waving their flags, drummers and brass bands, with masked figures and clowns and stiltwalkers all added to the mix. Unfortunately neither our graduate student guide nor our driver knew the procession route or asked anyone local where to drive and where to park. We spent an hour in stalled traffic and finally parked along a busy road, hoping to walk to the procession route.

But we found ourselves far at the back of the parade with an assortment of blaring sound trucks and crowds of dancers, few of them sober. We set out to make our way forward toward the chiefs, our graduate student leading the way. The crush of humanity around us was so intense that we were separated almost at once, and one student was challenged by a belligerent young men who had obviously had too much to drink. Susan took himm firmly by the hand and told him to stop bothering her boy.

I was at the back of our group, Samuel at the front, but I managed to communicate to all but the first few that we should wriggle our way out of the dancing human mass and move through back alleys for a kilometer or so. We emerged at a wider point in the street where we could watch the last few chiefs and warrior companies coming up a gradual rise—with some room to breathe. It was a fascinating spectacle, with far more people than at any other festival we have seen. The atmosphere was friendly and celebrative, though the muskets that were fired off at close range from time to time made us jump.

Eventually we followed the chiefs and their retinues toward the durbar ground, where each of the warrior companies would parade its colors and then take its place to listen to speeches by local chiefs, regional administrators, and the president of Ghana, John Atta Mills. But as we got closer the crowd became even more dense—and less friendly. Before long it was clear we could not hope to enter the parade grounds, so we crossed to a less crowded side street and headed back to the bus. Unfortunately, in that last few minutes of utter chaos, two students were the victims of pickpockets, one losing a camera and the other a mobile phone. A third student felt a hand reaching into his pocket and slapped it away, wondering who would want to steal its contents: a wad of toilet paper.

The 2009 Calvin group observed the Fetu Afahye festival and enjoyed it greatly, but they were given designated seats along the route by the proprietor of their hotel. We will not recommend returning in 2011, unless something can be worked out ahead of time to avoid trying to move with the crowd. It’s just too intense, and there are too many thieves in the mix. The students returned to their hostel to learn that several other foreign student groups had also been at the festival and none had returned without at least one person being robbed. For an understanding of festivals and why they remain such an important part of Ghanaian life, we get a great deal more insight from participating in the Odwira festival in Akropong.

We actually departed from Cape Coast nearly half an hour ahead of schedule—a first for this trip!—but lost all the time we gained in extremely heavy traffic coming into Accra. It had been a intense two days, and the students had lots to talk over on Monday when we spent a class period reviewing what we had seen and learned.