In traditional village life the daily routine was broken from time to time by the arrival of a traveling merchant with a variety of goods to sell, carried by donkey cart or wheelbarrow or bicycle. Such a vendor plays a key role in one of Sembene Ousmane’s films (perhaps it’s Moolaade). Whatever necessities and luxuries could not be produced in the village—“Holland wax” printed yard goods, commercial soap, manufactured tools and hardware, shoes—would be put on display, to admire and even to purchase. No doubt even today there are thousands of villages where traveling peddlers provide most of the “import goods.” But these days they would have to compete with residents who travel to town for work, daily or weekly or monthly, and bring purchases home for their own families or others.
In Accra, a bustling city of something like three million (plus or minus a million, depending on who’s estimating), it sometimes seems as if there are as many shops as people: tiny booths made of corrugated metal or converted shipping containers that line the streets of many districts, wooden stalls by the hundreds in each of a dozen major markets in the city, all the way up to a gigantic South African-owned shopping mall with a Shoprite supermarket, a Game department store, a bookstore and cinema and a dozen more upscale merchants that went up about two years ago near the university—Ghana’s very first full-scale shopping mall. (The traffic pattern to enter and exit the mall is so convoluted that I suspect it might be quicker to walk the 2 or 3 km than to drive—and there’s another story attached to that I will save for later, the Smallest Police Payoff in the History of Ghana). Yet legions of itinerant peddlers still ply their trade.
Let me highlight two different groups. First, there is the swarm of hawkers who approach drivers while they wait for traffic at every intersection in the city that backs up during peak traffic times—in other words, nearly every main road. Always there are girls selling “pure water” sachets from a large basin balanced on their heads (small sealed plastic sacks of water for 10 or 20 pesewas, less than 15 cents US) and young men selling Fan Ice ice cream treats, also in sealed packets. These are usually carried in tall plastic-fronted wooden boxes balanced on their heads, with dry ice at the bottom to keep their goods from melting in Accra’s hot sun—one of the few things that men regularly carry and sell from atop their heads. Neither of these are out in large numbers, though, perhaps because the rainy season has persisted well into September, with comparatively cool temperatures. When the heat intensifies they will do more business.
At every intersection there are vendors of mobile phone top-up cards, which they hold out fan-like in every major brand and denomination. Others display CDs or DVDs, one arm holding up an elaborate display with titles visible, the other a stack of 50 or 100 more. Yesterday a boy no more than ten years old had three DVDs to sell, all American action movies, probably all pirated, He tapped them against my window again and again, convinced that he could wear down my resistance.
Usually there are a few young men whose upper bodies are festooned with “spares” (car parts) including steering wheel covers, seat covers, floor mats, compasses, windscreen wiper blades, ignition cables, and wiping cloths. And there is always a wide selection of plastic toys: windmills, battery-operated cars, knockoff video games, toy radios and mobile phones, dolls, and so forth.
Beyond these categories I never know what I will be on offer. Nearly always someone is selling shoes, juggling twenty or thirty pairs in both arms with more in a backpack or on his head. Just why anyone would ever buy a pair of shoes in the few minutes of being stuck in traffic is beyond me – should you stick one foot out the window to try them on? But if they were making no sales the boys would not be out selling every day. Often there are women with clothes to sell: dresses, blouses, men’s shirts, scarves. Others offer jewelry, cosmetics, and household and laundry cleaning products. Batteries are nearly always on offer, as well as small electrical appliances such as irons, toasters, electric kettles, and multiple outlets to plug them into.
And then there are the food vendors, with packets of groundnuts (peanuts), “sugar bread” buns, little fried dough pieces, meat pies, sliced pineapple, papaya chunks, and kenkey (a fermented cornmeal loaf) wrapped in banana leaves. A snack that is obviously very popular is hard-boiled eggs: women (always women) carry thirty or forty neatly arranged around the rim of a shallow tray on their heads, with a dish of seasoning in the middle. If you buy one for 30 pesewas, the vendor quickly shucks off the shell and seasons the egg—either with ground pepper or by slicing it in half and inserting a peppery sauce. And she uses a sandwich bag to avoid touching it, something now common for all the street vendors, even those who sell baked goods, and an advance in hygiene over practices of five years ago.
I nearly forgot newspapers—the only thing regularly sold on the street in US cities.
While sitting motionless for half an hour in this morning’s traffic just outside the university entrance I jotted down more examples, selecting only those who had just one product for sale. Here’s the list: Easy-Off aerosol oven cleaner, posters showing dress styles, soccer balls, pens (she had several hundred balanced on her head), socks (hundreds and hundreds of pairs, all men’s dress socks), Pringles, Mentos, and lint brushes. One young man jogged around the traffic with nothing to sell except a huge wall clock, three feet across. Another had two large framed prints of sentimental scenes from the American South.
Hawking in traffic is illegal, and very dangerous when the traffic gets moving. From time to time the municipal government announces a campaign to eradicate it and targets a few intersections where the hawkers are making pile-ups even worse. Police chase away anyone who defies the ban. This has some effect, but not the intended one; the hawkers just move a few blocks away.
On to a second category different from this perpetually moving flea market on the roads: the women (never men) who walk around the campus carrying fruit, baked goods, and toiletries in basins on their head, selling to students and staff. They congregate around a few buildings where large classes are held, sometimes sitting on the low walls with their goods beside them in groups of three or four. I passed such a group yesterday as I was walking from IAS back up toward Commonwealth. Just as I approached, all of the women took their basins in their arms and dashed away, crouching behind the wall or a parked car. A woman walking nearby chuckled with me at the spectacle and pointed to an approaching university patrol car: they are not licensed to sell on campus, she said, because they have no health certificates. This seems a little silly—are you really at risk if you buy your bananas from an unlicensed vendor? And the rule is mostly ignored by everyone, including these campus security officers who drove by without a second glance.
Just outside IAS on Wednesday Samuel Ntewusu got into conversation with a woman selling baked goods from a basin on her head, a baby strapped to her back. They spoke for several minutes about something—was she a relative, or someone with whom Samuel wanted to place an order for tomorrow? No, he explained after she thanked him and walked on: this was a vendor whom he had encountered a week earlier accompanied by a child of about seven as well as the baby. He called her aside, he said, and reprimanded her: why are you taking your child with you to sell when she should be in school? Children belong in school, not selling on the streets, so that they can learn well and be prepared for future employment.
So what was this conversation about, I asked? “She told me that her child is in primary school now and thanked me for my concern. And I told her that when I get some small money I will give some to her to help her pay for uniforms and transport.” (Free public primary education for all was implemented in the early 2000s, just before our first visit to Ghana; but buying uniforms is a financial burden for many families.)
Two aspects of this episode are unimaginable in the US, yet completely normal here in Ghana: first, someone being accosted by a complete stranger telling her to take better care of her child and heeding his advice; second, the stranger assuring her that he will provide some “small money” to help her. Samuel is one of the most generous people we know, constantly distributing money and school supplies and yams and bags of flour and rice to friends and relatives and acquaintances whenever we travel with him, even though he has hardly a pesewa more than he needs to support Diana and their two children. But in Ghanaian eyes this isn’t really generosity: it’s just what every sensible person would do, taken to a slightly higher level.
