I encounter such greetings in so many places here, on returning after nearly five years away. This one was from Agnes, the older woman who oversees a fruit and vegetable stand where Susan and I used to shop regularly, halfway from the Legon campus to the center of Accra (across from Maxmart, if you know Accra). The stand is just as wildly colorful, just as crowded with carefully arranged stacks of every imaginable fruit of the tree and the vine and the bush, as when we last shopped there in 2005, but it has grown to three times its former size. The young women are mostly new, though some slip me shy smiles of recognition. The older ladies are the same, and seem no older. “Welcome!” they say, with a firm handshake: “Have you been well? Why have you not come longtime? How is Madame? Why she is not with you today? How is your beautiful daughter? Is she still in Ghana?”
I always come home with twice as much as I intended to buy—partly because it all looks so enticing, partly because they throw in a generous “dash,” often without even telling me what it is. Once it was several passionfruit, another time a third pineapple. Yesterday when I bought two avocados Agnes dashed me three more and also slipped in four custard apples. The avocados are not the little 6-ounce Haas avocados you can find at Meijer—they are big mamas, the size of small cantaloupes. And all five are hard as rocks. I wanted to use them for the supper I made for the students last night, but they need several days to ripen. At the end of this week—when Susan arrives—we’ll be eating avocados for breakfast, lunch and dinner.
But it’s really my fault that none are ripe. I should have said when I wanted to use them. I asked for a pineapple for today and another for tomorrow, a large papaya for today, and bananas for later in the week, and that’s exactly what I got. I am not buying many veggies yet, except tomatoes, because my stove is an extremely finicky and temperamental appliance. When the maintenance supervisor from Commonwealth Hall came to troubleshoot, the burners lit instantly and stayed on for several minutes; but as soon as they left, they went out. When Abraham was here (yes, the same Abraham we visited in London) yesterday and tried to see what might be wrong, it worked flawlessly. After he left, no dice. The principle seems to be that it works only when there are at least two people in the kitchen. So maybe after Susan arrives we’ll have no more problems. (More prosaically, I suspect that it has a bad LP gas regulator, with some sort of intermittent blockage.)
The same scene of welcome has been played out over and over again. The receptionist at IAS, the ever-cheerful Jamimah, greeted me warmly by name the first time I walked into the building, as did many of my onetime faculty colleagues at the Institute. At Legon Interdenominational Church, many people welcomed me back and expressed surprise that it has been as long as five years since I was last there. The proprietor of Wiltex café, located outside a residence hall on my walking route from Commonwealth down to IAS, greeted me warmly when I stopped there for lunch on Friday and said he was sure he had seen me walking past earlier in the week. And when we took the students to the Art Center, a sprawling craft market in central Accra, the vendors from whom Susan and I bought some of our favorite pieces of sculpture came out immediately to welcome “Prof David” back to Accra. And of course they wanted to show me some especially fine pieces, remembering our interest in older pieces from a variety of traditions, on which they could offer me a very special price. (Yes, I did succumb: I bought a small Dan mask and a Yoruba twin figure, both exquisitely pieces that fill some gaps in our collection. And one more touristy akwaba figure that caught my fancy.)
But I’m getting a little ahead of myself. On arrival on August 7, the faculty coordinator from the Institute for African Studies who said he would meet my plane was nowhere to be found. But John and Victoria Sackey were there, unannounced, to welcome me “home.” Dr. Osman showed up fifteen minutes later—and it’s fortunate they both came, because my luggage and that of the one student who traveled with me from Dulles would never have fit into one car with the two extra people. When we arrived at the flat that Calvin has hired for the past few years, adjacent to Commonwealth Hall in a lovely spot far up the hill from the main campus gate, there was Ben Asiedu of the Akrofi-Christaller Institute, to be sure I had the keys I needed for the flat and for the Calvin car that had been stored at ACI since last December. What a warm welcome!
The flat, which I saw and had doubts about last November, is exactly as I remembered: adequate in size (if not nearly as spacious as the house in Haatso), ideally located within a half-hour walk of the Institute for African Studies and the International Student Hostel, reasonably well equipped (after the porters brought over the furniture that was stored at the hall, and Ben delivered the printer and kitchen equipment that was stored at ACI)—and dark and airless as a mausoleum. At some point—whether before or after Amy Patterson first occupied it as Calvin director in 2008 I don’t know—Commonwealth staff decided to enhance security by nailing down every shutter on every window, except two that open onto a front veranda that is pretty dark itself. And these are very heavy shutters, through which hardly a sliver of light ever penetrates.
If I were to step outside right now (9 pm), I would enjoy a lovely cooling breeze rising from the campus below. If I moved inside the veranda, I would catch just an occasional stirring of the same breeze, through the fine mesh screens. But inside the house, all the stale air of the past week remains—stirred up by ceiling fans, cooled when necessary by a couple of ancient AC units that wheeze and thump and eventually bring the temperature down a bit. Split AC units are standard here—silent in operation, mounted outside with a narrow tube leading to a fan unit high on an interior wall—and are installed in every academic building and office and many homes (including our Haatso house). But when the hall decided to install AC in this flat, they boarded up the only exterior window in the master bedroom and installed a window unit that, from its appearance, appears to have been military surplus from World War II.
I have managed to pry open one narrow shutter in the kitchen, so when I am working there I sometimes get a bit of moving air. I’m working on some others, so far without success. I have asked the maintenance staff of the hall to remove the heavy batten they placed over the shutters for the rear patio doors, but they made no commitment and I’ve seen no indication that they intend to do so. I could not leave those doors open for ventilation, since there is no screening. But if I opened the shutters in the morning, at least I could verify, while sitting at my dining table, that it is day and not night outside.
Sorry—no more whining! In nearly every respect except the shortcomings of this flat, it’s a joy to be back at Legon. And the flat has its pluses. The kitchen (assuming the stove will eventually work) is much roomier than the one in the Haatso house. There is only cold running water, as is usual here (I use an electric kettle for washing up), but it has never stopped running on the weekend, as it often did in 2009 before the hall installed a new rooftop tank. And the point-of-use hot water heater for the shower works well. The students are jealous, since there are only cold showers in the campus hostels. They warned me that they may ask to use the restroom at my flat when we meet there and come back half an hour later with wet hair.
My biggest worry after seeing the flat last November has proved to be unfounded: we really can gather all 16 students here for Sunday evening socials. (In Haatso I held one of my class meetings at the house each week, but I’m not going to attempt that here—the students would have to balance books and notebooks on each other’s backs.) Our routine is to spread out comfortably inside and out on the veranda while we eat and chat, then pack the chairs tightly into the living room for our discussions, hoping that none of those seated near the kitchen will need to cross the room to use the bathroom before we are finished. We could just pass them over our heads across the room if necessary.
And as for those 16 students, 15 of whom arrived on August 11: they are coping admirably with all the stresses of living in West Africa, negotiating trotros and markets and the badgering of craft vendors with aplomb, and in general showing a commendable level of maturity and curiosity. I think it’s going to be an outstanding semester. They are flexible and patient, not even complaining when (as on Friday) the bus that we were told would arrive at 9 am arrived at 10:40. They’ve learned to carry a book everywhere.
A worry for recent directors has been students’ insensitivity to local modes of dress, insisting on wearing what’s comfortable even if when standard American campus dress would be conspicuously informal, verging on indecent, by local standards. But this year’s group has erred on the side of caution instead: “Prof, do you think this top will be OK for the festival? Will we be meeting the chief, so I should cover my knees and shoulders?” And they are thoughtful and considerate young people, toward me, toward each other and toward Ghanaian friends and hosts.
I will not know til later how seriously and consistently they will take their academic work, but early indications are encouraging. Shared textbooks are passing from hand to hand all the time. At the two sessions I have held of my class on “Ethics of Development and Cultures of Africa” nearly all the students have come to class well prepared, with good questions about the assigned readings and interesting observations from their first weeks in Ghana. I had only email contact with these students in the spring while I was in Kenya, and the interviews with applicants were conducted by Off-Campus Programs staff and returning Ghana students. Indeed, there were half a dozen students I had never met in person until they arrived in Accra. But every one of them is an active and constructive contributor to our discussions, and I look forward eagerly to helping them come to know West Africa more closely.
Let me close this entry with the thought that went through my mind one day last week—“what a joy it is to live among Ghanaians again!”—and the incidents that motivated the thought. I went out to shop at the fruit and vegetable stand, and the young woman who waited on me insisted on carrying all my purchases to my car, parked some distance away. Even at Maxmart, a big Lebanese-owned supermarket catering to expats where courtesy and hospitality can sometimes descend nearly to American levels, the stockers and cashiers were friendly and helpful. Driving back to campus, I needed to make a left turn across traffic, and an oncoming driver—a trotro driver, no less, a breed known for their brazen defiance of every law and every courtesy—signaled by flashing headlights that he would wait for me to do so. When I let a taxi driver slip into the traffic in front of me on campus, he waved a gesture of thanks out his window.
Arriving back at the Institute, Jamimah greeted me with a broad smile and a warm word of welcome as always, as did each of the lecturers and graduate students who were standing around in the entrance area. Samuel Abokyi, our grad student assistant, came to discuss his difficulties finding lodging for next weekend in Cape Coast but said he would travel there on Friday to find rooms and place a deposit. (He was successful.) A student knocked on my door by mistake, looking for another lecturer, but then asked me a number of questions about Calvin and thanked me warmly for the information, saying he would look at Calvin’s website and consider applying to study there.
In the morning I had brought my sheets over to the porters’ desk at Commonwealth and asked for clean ones, and they told me to return in the afternoon. They brought out a clean set, but would not give them to me: instead the porters motioned to another staff member to carry them over to the flat for me. When he arrived he asked, “May I put them on the bed for you?” He worked and worked at it (it’s a king-size foam mattress, very tightly squeezed into a wooden frame, and there are only flat sheets, not fitted) and got the sheet very taut. (But even though I had requested two sheets for each bed he left the other one folded up: Ghanaians don’t use top sheets and don’t seem to get the concept.)
None of these helpers expected a tip, and each would have behaved in just the same way to a Ghanaian buying fruit or picking up sheets. And I just remembered another example: on the way from IAS back to my flat I picked up a load of laundry from an on-campus laundromat. (Yes, there are mechanical washing and drying machines in Ghana now! Mostly in laundromats.) The parking attendant at Akuafo Hall, an elderly man seated on a chair near where I parked, called out to me to be sure to close my windows and lock my doors, so I did so. When I returned with my basket, he apologized: “If I had known you were picking laundry, sir, I would have carried it for you.”
Life in Africa is about relationships, it is often said, not about priority lists or schedules or individual entitlements. This is evident in the way people use their money and their time, in the way families support each other even when scattered across several continents, and in the way births and weddings and deaths are marked. And it is no less evident if you just come to Accra and spend an ordinary day shopping and working. I’m an American, not an African; but this seems like such a sensible and way to live. And that’s one of the reasons why, much as I miss Susan and other family and friends, coming back to Ghana feels like coming home.
Postscript just before posting this on 30 September: I took a student to the hospital early this morning and have been back and forth since. She had a severe allergic reaction to something, causing fainting and weakness and low blood pressure, but she’s been admitted and put on IV antibiotics and fluids, and she’s steadily improving and becoming herself again. I’m sure she will be well enough by Friday to join our first field trip, to the Central Region. But what connected with this closing theme was a little encounter with a compactly built older man who was on duty as parking attendant this morning. He had summoned an aide with a wheelchair to to carry the student, then only half conscious, from car to clinic when I arrived at 5 am, then directed me to a parking space. When I went back to the car about 7 to get some papers, he called out to me, “And how is the daughter doing now?” (Actually he said “son”—many Ghanaians mix up genders in English. He wasn’t suggesting that I am really her father, only linking us as part of an extended family in the traditional way.) I said she was resting and feeling much stronger already. “There is no need to worry,” he responded, with a big smile: “God will do everything!”
