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.
