The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

Copyright © Mark Moxon 2024

All rights reserved

This version was compiled on 30 March 2024

This work has been released under the Creative Commons licence Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). This means you are free to distribute this work to others as long as you retain this copyright notice, do not use the work for commercial purposes and do not alter, transform or build upon this work. For more details please read the full licence.

Front cover: Punting to the stilt village of Nzulezo on the Amansuri Lagoon

See www.moxon.net for more information

Preface

This book is a collection of writing from the road, covering a one-month trip I made to Ghana in 2002/03. This was part of a larger, three-month journey that took me through Senegal, the Gambia, Mali, Burkina Faso and Ghana during 2002 and 2003.

The travelogue for all these countries and more can be found on my personal website at www.moxon.net, where you can also find travel tips, recommended journeys and further free books for you to download.

I’ve released this book and its companions via a Creative Commons Licence, which means you are free to distribute it to everyone and anyone, as long as you distribute it on a non-commercial basis and make no changes to it. If you know someone who might like this book, please pass it on; I make no money from it, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading it and recommending it to their friends.

Finally, please be aware that this book attempts to be humorous every now and then, so there’s a slight chance that it might cause offence to those who think my sense of humour is as amusing as a puddle of mud. On top of this, some parts will be out of date – which is why each article is dated – and others will betray the naivety of a traveller who discovered his way in the world by throwing himself into it headfirst. It is, however, an honest account of how I felt as I travelled through West Africa for three months, and as such, I hope you enjoy it.

Mark Moxon

June 2014

Central Ghana

The Struggle into Ghana

Written: 15 December 2002

I sometimes wonder if this travelogue is in danger of turning into nothing more than a detailed examination of being ill in exotic locations, because for the last couple of weeks, that’s all it’s felt like. At least in India I was granted a couple of weeks’ respite between illnesses, but in West Africa things have degraded after a promising start, what with the Lariam, the homesickness and various bouts of intestinal hockey. In my defence, a good travelogue must report the trip faithfully, but feel free to skip this one if you’re sick and tired of the sick and tired.

While waiting for my visa in Ouagadougou, I was all geared up for Ghana. The number of people I met in Mali and Burkina who’d come from Ghana was considerable, and except for one solitary Norwegian girl, who didn’t strike me as the kind of person who would enjoy anything, the reports were utterly enthusiastic. Although the consensus was that there wasn’t a great deal to see in Ghana, the laid-back locals and ease of travelling sounded like a major respite after the effort of the Sahel.

I was thoroughly excited, then, to be hopping on the direct bus from Ouagadougou to Kumasi, Ghana’s second city. I’d decided that my main aim for the next week was to get to the beach on the southern coast of Ghana, a delightful sounding spot that I reckoned would be perfect for Christmas, but the prospect of an overnight bus journey all the way to Accra was just a little too much in one go, so I decided to opt for a stopover in Kumasi; the 8.30am Ouaga bus was due to arrive in Kumasi around 8.30pm, which sounded much more manageable than turning up in the wee hours of the morning.

Of course, nothing’s ever that straightforward. Getting up at the crack of dawn to report to the bus station for 6.30am, I shook the sleep from my head to find that – surprise, surprise – I’d picked up yet another stomach problem. I couldn’t believe it; I had only managed to shift my Dogon bug a couple of days earlier, and here I was again, gnawing on leather every few minutes and looking forward to a long journey of clenching, sweating and praying. There was nothing for it, though; I needed to get to Ghana to save my sanity, so I put a brave face on it and grabbed a taxi to the gare routière.

The journey was thankfully uneventful, except for an unscheduled four-hour stop at the Burkina-Ghana border because someone’s customs papers weren’t properly filled in, and by 12.30am I finally arrived in Kumasi, pale but in one piece. Following the guidebook like a bear with no brain I plucked the first choice from the hotel section – the Presbyterian Guesthouse, known locally as the Presby – and discovered that they were full, but I could sleep on the balcony if I wanted. I wanted; the thought of a shower and a toilet was too much to resist, and at 1.30am I finally settled into my first night in Ghana, sweating under my mosquito net on the wooden balcony of an ancient colonial-style building. ‘Things could be a lot worse,’ I figured as I rolled over into a fitful sleep.

Trying Hard to Smile

By 5am they were a lot worse. I woke up feeling terrible, and ten minutes later I just knew I was going to be sick. It wasn’t long before I was bringing up nothing but acrid yellow bile, and wondering what I’d done to deserve yet another bout of illness so soon after the last one. If you’d tapped me on the shoulder and handed me a flight ticket home, I’d have grabbed it faster than you could say ‘Bleearghh!’

The next day I felt a little better and managed some breakfast and a short walk around Kumasi, but although things were improving, I ran out of energy pretty quickly and took refuge in an internet café down the road from the Presby. This turned out to be a bad move; instead of writing the happy emails of someone in a new and exciting country, I wrote the emails of someone who would rather be back home in England, away from nasty bacteria and the humidity of the tropics. Instantly regretting sending anything at all, I decided the only way to cheer myself up was to eat something really special, especially now that I had my appetite back and the diarrhoea appeared to have stopped, so I headed off to Vic Baboo’s Restaurant in town and ordered their curry special.

What was I thinking? Curry? I must have been out of my mind – by this stage I quite possibly was – and although the food was excellent, I only managed to eat half of it before the cold sweats signalled a problem. I hobbled back to the Presby for an early night, and found myself suffering a whole new game; I had serious issues with gas.

My stomach was hard, firm and felt like a shaken bottle of pop, and as the night wore slowly on, the burping started. These weren’t little, friendly burps, they were explosions of cyclonic proportions, and every time I rolled over I could feel the next bubble of acidic gas making its way up my oesophagus and into the stuffy night air. And just in case I thought I was going to be able to sleep my way through it, cramps hit my lower abdomen and my guts turned to water. I was back in the shit again.

So here I am, spending Sunday trying to recover, drinking bottled water and eating bananas, the best friend of the ill traveller. I still can’t believe just how cruel West Africa is turning out to be; I haven’t been taking any chances with food and water since the Dogon – no scary street meat or bisap, much to my irritation – but here I am, losing weight rapidly and thoroughly fed up with being ill. But worst of all I’m gutted, because it’s in serious danger of ruining my trip. In this sort of state it’s practically impossible to think of anything else except going home, where I can eat food without worrying about dying, I don’t have to take strange drugs to avoid tropical diseases, and I can be with my girlfriend. This isn’t why I went travelling; I’m supposed to be having such a fantastic time that I don’t want to go home.

So I’m giving Africa until after Christmas to persuade me to stay, or I may end up coming home early. So far, West Africa really hasn’t been worth the physical effort it’s taken out of me; I’m at the end of my tether, and if you don’t have your health, it’s impossible to enjoy travelling. What a pity it’s turning out this way, but there you go.

Come on Ghana, you can do it!

Kumasi

Written: 16 December 2002

Despite the awful state of my mind and body I find myself liking Kumasi. Instantly it feels completely different to Senegal, Mali and Burkina Faso, and that’s refreshing, even if the weather isn’t; for the first time in ages the sky is cloudy, the air is humid, and I can feel the threat of a downpour in the air, even if the chances of it actually raining are pretty slim. After so long in the dry Sahel I’ve almost forgotten what moisture feels like, and here it is, dripping off me in bed; it isn’t pleasant but it’s different, and a change is as good as a rest.

The humidity also explains the amazing amount of greenery in Kumasi. Back in Tamale, the last major city I passed through on the way south, the feeling was still one of dry scrubland, but here in Kumasi I find myself looking out from the balcony of the Presbyterian Guesthouse over green grass, palm trees and lush, tropical growth. At last I’ve managed to escape the harshness of the desert for more genuinely tropical Africa, and it feels good.

To add to the tropical flavour, I drifted off to sleep on my first night in Ghana to the sound of a gospel choir singing in perfect harmony. It felt a little weird that it was 2am and the choir was still singing, but that’s one thing about Ghana; the Christian church is everywhere and everything, in the same way that Allah is everywhere in the Muslim countries. You don’t have the muezzin waking you up in the morning, you have the sounds of evangelical ministers proclaiming that the Lord cometh, and everywhere the shops and buses have Biblical names and inscriptions instead of Islamic ones.

Another difference between Kumasi and the countries of the Sahel is that Kumasi feels considerably better off. Ghana is a richer country than either Mali or Burkina Faso and it’s noticeable: the streets are in much better condition, the sewers are covered more often than they’re open, there’s a lot less litter and everything just feels that much more civilised. It’s especially odd because Ghana is a lot cheaper than the countries I’ve already visited; this is because the cedi – the currency of Ghana, whose name comes from sedee, the Akan word for cowrie shell, one of the original forms of currency in the area – has taken a real pounding on the exchange markets recently, bringing down prices for visitors and pushing up inflation for the locals. This is obviously not a good thing, but for the traveller it does mean things are more affordable, a pleasant surprise after the expensive CFA countries.

As for Kumasi itself, I only managed to visit the Military Museum, where I couldn’t really concentrate on being a tourist; instead I came home early and sat recuperating in the wonderful wooden-balconied Presby. I managed a visit to an internet café, a trip to the pharmacist to stock up on the anti-malarial drug Doxycycline (which I am now taking instead of Lariam), and I made a few phone calls to sort out my plans for the next few days, but I didn’t really explore properly; most of the time I was being ill in true West African style

Malingering Malian

I do remember one thing, though, and that’s just how pleasant it is to be able to speak English to the locals. It transforms things, and although it means I can’t feign a lack of language skills to get rid of the touts, it removes a layer of stress that’s been with me since the start of my trip (my short break in the Gambia notwithstanding). The touts in Kumasi aren’t as bad as they are in places like Mopti or Bamako, but there are still some annoying little buggers who insist on following me round while trying to foist ugly jewellery on me, and one of these neatly sums up my issues with the Francophone countries. I was standing in the queue for the cash machine at Barclays Bank, and a guy joined the queue behind me, waiting his turn. He struck up conversation in French, and conditioned by my time in the Sahel, I replied in French and discovered that he was from Goa in Mali. He seemed friendly enough, but once I’d used the cash machine he followed me from the bank without using it himself.

‘Where are you going now?’ he asked, in French.

‘Why do you ask?’ I replied.

‘I’d like to help you,’ he said.

‘I’m fine, thanks, I’m just going to get some breakfast,’ I replied.

‘I can show you lots of good places,’ he said, ‘and then maybe I can show you my work, my friend.’

And then the penny dropped: he was a tout from bloody Mali, who just wanted to flog me something. I wasn’t amused; I’d assumed he’d been in the queue for the cash machine to withdraw his money, not mine.

‘Listen, I’m only going to say this once,’ I said, in French. ‘I’ve come to Ghana because I’m tired of speaking French, so from this moment on I’m only going to speak in English, and I’m going to ignore anything you say that’s in French. And just for the record, I do not want to buy anything, I do not want a guide, and I don’t need showing round. OK?’

Of course, this hasn’t stopped him following me for the last few days, constantly trying to show me his jewellery and insisting on speaking in French, which I pretend not to understand. I’ve found out that a number of other tourists who are also staying at the Presby have been hassled by the same Malian, and he’s driving them mad, hanging round the gates and being insistent to the point of rudeness. The fact that the most annoying person in Kumasi is from Mali and not Ghana demonstrates a fundamental difference between the two places; I’m sure Ghanaian touts are just as irritating, but something tells me the Francophone countries produce a different class of salesman to the Anglophone ones. I look forward to testing this theory, especially now I have enough French to tell them exactly how disinterested I am in cheap jewellery and guided tours. I just pity the poor sod who tries to sell me a trek to Dogon Country in Ghana; they’ll rue the day.

The Road to Jesus

Written: 16 December 2002

Taking the bus from Kumasi to Accra is a religious experience, and I’m not talking about praying to get there in one piece. If the Sahel is obsessed with Allah and Mohammed, then Ghana is obsessed with Jesus and the Bible, and its obsession is a very public one; Ghanaian Christianity is like American Evangelism with all the fake sincerity stripped away, and it’s so powerful it pervades every single aspect of society. In Ghana there are twice as many Christians as Muslims, with the Christians mainly in the south and the Muslims in the north, and as you burn south along the Kumasi-Accra highway and into the heart of Christian Ghana it’s like having your own personal baptism. Welcome to Jesus, Ghanaian-style.

I brushed against Ghanaian Christianity in Kumasi; I drifted off to sleep and woke up again to the sounds of gospel singing, exuberant preachers and congregations in which everyone was actually singing, a novel concept after the lacklustre and somewhat threadbare flocks you come across in England. But it’s in everyday conversation with the Ghanaians that you realise just how important Jesus is round here, as I found out on the Sunday morning before leaving Kumasi. I felt so terrible I asked the concierge at the Presby if it would be possible to see a doctor, thinking this wouldn’t be a problem in a major city like Kumasi.

‘Ooh,’ he said, sucking his teeth. ‘No, that would not be possible, as they are all at church at the moment. Maybe you can see a doctor tonight, but not now.’

‘What, there are no doctors at all on Sunday mornings?’ I asked, amazed.

He just smiled an understanding smile. ‘I pray that you will get better,’ he said, and that was the end of that. I guess the moral of the story is that if you get sick on Sunday morning, prayer is your best option.

But the full impact of Ghana’s obsession with Christianity hit me on the Kumasi-Accra bus. It was dark when I arrived in central Ghana a few days ago, but today the bus left Kumasi at noon, and the full glory of God was there for me to behold, right by the road. There’s the odd mosque or Hindu school en route, but the vast majority of Ghana’s roadside signs point to churches or shops, and it doesn’t take a theologian to conclude that Ghana is completely Jesus crazy.

Hallowed Be Thy Name

Ghana’s church names are relatively staid, though the lack of repetition between names is surprising; in England most churches are named after saints, but not so in Ghana. The Redeemer’s Victory Church sits down the road from the New Testament Christian Centre, just along from the Apostolic Church of God and the Miracle Temple, which are opposite the Voice of Christ Church and the New Church Study Centre. You’ll rarely see two churches with the same name, but even the church names pale into insignificance compared to the shops. Oh my.

In Ghana, you just ain’t cooking with gas unless your shop has Biblical connections, and as the bus bounced along the road, I read every shop name religiously, because they really have to be seen to be believed. The ‘Opener of Closed Doors’ Hair Salon promises to change your life with a snip of the scissors, while ‘God Will Provide’ Engineering Supplies no doubt use that as their excuse for non-delivery. The ‘Jesus Never Fails’ Chop House (a ‘chop house’ being a basic Ghanaian restaurant) looks like it’s fed far more than five thousand, while the ‘In God We Trust’ Communication Centre sounds like a ready-made excuse for being cut off. The ‘God is Able’ Chemical Store sells the products of a modern atheistic science, while it’s unlikely that the ‘Joy of Peace’ Hotel provides anything of the sort. Similarly the ‘Paradise’ Spot (a ‘spot’ being a pub) sits on the edge of a busily polluted highway, and the ‘More Grace’ Estate could do with exactly that.

Some shops, meanwhile, are happy to plunder the Good Lord’s book for awful puns, with the ‘Staff of Life’ Bakery, the ‘Healing Hands’ Clinic and the ‘Almighty’ Cold Store making the most of the theme. Others just sound bizarre: ‘Thy Will Be Done’ Snacks and ‘God is King’ Brakes are just about acceptable, but when you start getting too keen, you end up with mouthfuls like ‘The Lord is My Light’ Beauty Salon and the ‘God is My Redeemer’ Fashion Store, while it’s anyone’s guess what’s for sale at ‘Father’s Love’ Enterprises.

As we shot along the highway, I searched in vain for the ‘Jesus Saves’ Bank and the ‘Burning Bush’ STD Clinic, but the only thing I could find that came close was the ubiquitous and blatantly untrue Guinness slogan, ‘Guinness Brings Out the Power in You’. I guess alcohol is one of those things you just can’t sell with the Son of God.

Off the Road

The buses and trucks that ply Ghana’s highways don’t escape quotation fever either. They too are plastered with Christian epithets, like ‘Go With God’, ‘In God We Trust’, ‘Jesus Never Fails’ and ‘Perseverance’, but in the 255km journey from Kumasi to Accra we came across three serious crashes, two involving overturned trucks and one involving a minibus that had ploughed a 20m-long furrow straight into a field of banana trees, proving that the Son of God may never fail, but ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’ brake pads can. One wonders if the drivers were running on Guinness power; it would explain a lot about driving standards in Ghana.

For this very reason I chose to go to Accra in an STC bus, as I’d been told that STC drivers don’t try to overtake on blind corners. I was in good company; the bus was full of obviously well-off Ghanaians, as was evident from their pressed clothes and smart luggage, a complete lack of chickens and goats, and good English. But the most obvious indication of their status was the large number of mobile phones, which kept ringing and ringing as if there was no tomorrow. Ghana is still at the stage where having a mobile phone is a serious deal, so people let them ring a little longer than is strictly necessarily so others can see that they have one; they then shout into the mouthpiece so everyone can hear their conversation, however banal, and they haven’t yet tired of testing out all the ring tones one by one, just so everybody can see how rich they are. It’s intensely irritating, but that’s progress for you.

It will be interesting to see if the power of Jesus is strong enough to take on the growing lure of consumerism and win. Given the nationwide levels of addiction to Christianity in Ghana, my money’s on the Son of God; the side with the best ad agency will win in the end, and Jesus is already off to a flying start.

The Cedi Shuffle

Written: 16 December 2002

Like most of the rest of the world, the economy in Ghana has been suffering recently, a situation not helped by the continuing escalation of violence in neighbouring Côte d’Ivoire. The results are the typical macro-economic effects that seem to be controlled by invisible forces, such as high inflation rates, high government debt and a currency that’s lost an incredible amount on the exchange markets. I don’t even pretend to understand these things; I’m not convinced that those in power do either.

The most palpable effect of the economic downturn is the falling value of Ghana’s currency, the cedi, on the foreign exchange markets. Ghana is not a member of the CFA union so it doesn’t benefit from the euro-like propping up of the exchange rate that you see in places like Mali and Senegal, and recent economic stresses have pushed the cedi into free-fall. A couple of years ago there were around 8000 cedi to the pound; now it’s around 13,000, which is great news if you’re a traveller with pounds in your pocket, but awful news if you’re a Ghanaian trying to save his cedis.

Normally this wouldn’t be worth writing about, except to mention that for visitors, things are a lot cheaper in Ghana than they are in places like Mali; everything costs less, from accommodation to food, and even though a lot of hotels quote their prices in dollars so that the cedi price rides along with the exchange rate, it’s still a completely different experience to the Sahel. You don’t worry about whether you can afford that extra beer or dessert; the answer is always a happily gluttonous ‘Yes!’, and it’s quite liberating. The problem is that until this morning, the largest note in Ghana was the 5000 cedi note.

Let’s put this into perspective. This means that the highest value note is worth about 38p, with the two smaller notes being worth about 15p (2000 cedis) and 7.5p (1000 cedis); the coins aren’t even worth considering, with the largest one being just under 4p, and the smallest being less than half a penny. This is all very well on paper, but when you try changing your travellers cheques, it all hits home. I decided to change some money in Kumasi, ready to hit the capital and the coast, so I fished out three slim £100 cheques and headed down to Barclays before they opened at 8.30am on Monday morning.

It might look like a normal Barclays Bank from the outside, and the counters might be all polished and the seats arranged in the same enticing way that they might be in London, but when the doors open at the Kumasi branch of Barclays, that’s where the similarity ends. There are two doors into the bank, one on each side of the counters, and at 8.30am two security men go to the doors, signal to each other, and open up at precisely the same time. And through both doors pour the hordes of Kumasi, ready to do battle with the bankers.

I couldn’t believe it; I stood there bewildered as the stampede of locals rushed round me like torrential rain down a dry creek bed, and two seconds after the doors opened, there were huge queues snaking round the room from all of the cashier points. If I wanted to change my cheques it was going to be a long wait, so I asked one of the employees which queue I should join and he smiled and pointed me upstairs.

Thank goodness; the queue was only one deep at the foreign exchange desk, and ten minutes later I’d managed to change my £300 into cedis. For my three cheques I got a wad of nearly 800 notes – that’s around four inches of cedis – and this demonstrates the real problem of Ghanaian money; you need a bag to carry it in. The banks know this, and they hand you your money in a black plastic bag so you don’t look too conspicuous. Imagine £300 in notes of 38p; it’s quite a sight.

The National Museum in Accra dramatically demonstrates the slide of the cedi in its display of Ghanaian currencies through the years. The cedi was launched in 1965, when the largest note was the rare and valuable 100 cedi note, though the one cedi note was the cornerstone of the economy. By 1984 the bank had started issuing 200 cedi notes, but as the economic slowdown of the 1980s kicked in, higher notes of 500 cedis and 1000 cedis appeared in 1986 and 1991. The 5000 cedi note appeared in the 1990s, and it’s only today that the bank has got around to releasing 10,000 and 20,000 cedi notes. For Ghanaians, who are used to carrying huge wads of notes around in their top pockets, it’s a big relief, even though with 20,000 cedi notes, £300 would require some 200-odd notes, still a fair amount when it takes just 15 in England (and that’s ignoring the £50 note). I tried to get my money in 20,000 cedi denominations, but as they were only launched this morning, the lady behind the counter could only smile and say, ‘Everyone wants the new notes; I can only give you some.’ I managed to save perhaps half a centimetre by getting 500,000 cedis in 20,000 notes; it barely made any difference.

As a result of the large amount of paper you need to carry round to survive in Ghana, the locals have developed a serious skill when it comes to counting notes. Every Ghanaian you meet can count a pile of money in two seconds flat, holding the notes in the left hand and flicking them off with the right, faster than the eye can see. Every transaction is always checked on both sides, not because people don’t trust each other, but because it’s so easy to make a mistake with such a large number of notes. In Ghana, everyone does the cedi shuffle.

Accra and Kokrobite

The Auditor-General

Written: 19 December 2002

It started off with a short email message from my brother. ‘Have got details of Eddie’s uncle in Ghana,’ it said, and gave a telephone number. ‘Uncle’s name is Mr Osei Tutu Prempeh, and he says he knew of Jimmy Moxon. He was Attorney-General of Ghana, so treat with due respect.’

This was enough for me. One of my aims of visiting Ghana is to find out about Jimmy Moxon, the only white man ever to be made a genuine African chief; as the Moxon clan isn’t exactly extensive there’s a marginal possibility that Jimmy and I are related in some utterly distant manner, but even without such a tenuous link, his story is worth investigation. But irrespective of my mission, one of the best things about travelling is meeting the locals, and what better way than to be introduced to the uncle of a friend of my brother’s? So clutching a Ghana Telecom phone card in my slightly shaking palm, I dialled the number I’d been given from one of the sweatboxes in Kumasi’s telecom centre.

‘Oh, hello there,’ I said in the obsequious accent my telephone phobia forces me to adopt when phoning complete strangers. ‘Is that the house of Mr Osei Tutu Prempeh?’

‘Yes, it is,’ said a female voice at the other end.

‘Um, you don’t know me,’ I continued, ‘but my name is Mark Moxon and I’m rather hoping that Mr Prempeh’s nephew Kwesi has talked to him about me. I’m visiting Ghana for a couple of months, and I’d very much like to say hello.’

‘Ah, certainly, just hold on for a minute Mr Moxon,’ she said. ‘Let me get Uncle OT for you.’

After a pause, Mr Prempeh came on the line.’ Hello, Mr Moxon?’ he said.

‘Hello, Mr Prempeh,’ I said. ‘How are you?’

‘Very well,’ he replied. ‘So you are in Ghana and you are looking for information on Jimmy Moxon?’

‘I sure am,’ I said.

‘Where are you?’ he asked.

‘I am in Kumasi,’ I said, ‘but I’m hoping to come down to Accra in the next few days.’

‘Then you must come to see us,’ he said, and with that I entered the world of the Prempehs. What a world it would turn out to be.

From Bus to Back Seat

The moment I arrived in Accra, I was whisked off and mollycoddled in a way I haven’t seen since my days of staying with millionaire ex-pats in Spain. If there’s one thing about Africa it’s that when you have something, you make sure you hold onto it, and from the moment I stepped off the Kumasi STC bus in Accra, I left the world of the dishevelled backpacker and entered the world of the global statesman, even though I didn’t know it at the time. All I had in my head was the title ‘Attorney-General’ as I dialled Mr Prempeh’s house from Accra State Transport station, the nerves of the lone traveller in a strange country fluttering in my stomach.

When Mr Prempeh came to the phone I offered to take a taxi to his house, but the tone in his voice implied that he’d much rather send his driver to pick me up; as I had no idea where anything was in Accra, this sounded just fine and dandy to me, especially after the tropical plastic seats of the public bus. I waited in the bus terminal, watching Ghanaian television and savouring the still-novel pleasure of being able to understand what the newsreader was saying, and half an hour later three men walked up to me, the one at the front offering me his hand with a beaming smile.

‘Mr Moxon?’ he said. ‘I am Osei Tutu Prempeh. Welcome to Accra.’

‘Hello Mr Prempeh,’ I said, ‘I’m delighted to be here,’ and with the formalities over we walked over to his Range Rover, his driver carrying my luggage. Mr Prempeh and I sat in the back seats while the driver eased us into the chaotic Accran traffic that had delayed my bus, and the air conditioning got to work on evaporating the stickiness on the back of my shirt and trousers, making me shiver slightly, a rather pleasant feeling after the city heat. While I settled in for the ride we made polite small talk, and I explained all about my trip through Africa and my interest in Jimmy Moxon. Mr Prempeh is a slightly rounded man, sporting a short, white, moustache-free beard that conspires with his closely cropped haircut to give his face a particularly friendly air, and he sat back in his seat and talked in his Ghanaian accent about the BBC, his nephew and the traffic in Accra. The conversation was polite, reserved and formal, so I got my excuses in early.

‘I have to apologise for the state of my wardrobe,’ I said, thinking of my crinkled linen trousers mustering in the bottom of my backpack, and the stretched T-shirt that had started out black, but which was now more the colour of café au lait. ‘I’ve been travelling for over two months through the desert, and these are my only smart clothes.’ And they were; I was wearing a crinkle-free shirt, cunningly coloured with a brown checker pattern to disguise the dirt that no doubt hid under the design, and grey polyester trousers, bought for their ability to survive the harshest packing regime without creasing. These were my best border-crossing clothes; I hoped they would do.

‘Ha!’ laughed Mr Prempeh. ‘Of course, I understand, it is not easy to travel like you are. You have to travel light; there is no need to apologise.’

I sighed my relief. Perhaps I was going to be able to remain a traveller in the land of the air-conditioned Range Rover.

Prempeh Towers

It wasn’t long before we arrived at Mr Prempeh’s house, deep in the affluent suburbs of the Airport Residential Area. Accra is evidently still at the developmental stage where it is a positive bonus to be within hailing distance of the airport, and there is an obvious difference between the sprawling chaos of central Accra and the wide boulevards of the airport surrounds, where large houses stand back from the street, guarded by night watchmen and menacing dogs. As the gates swung open to the Prempeh house, I noticed rolls of evil-looking razor wire along the tops of the surrounding walls; obviously nobody in this neighbourhood takes any chances with their property.

And who can blame them? Accra might be one of the safer African capitals, at least compared to places like Lagos and Dakar, but you don’t risk everything for want of adequate security. Mr Prempeh was quite adamant; Accra was no place for me to go walking round on my own, and while I was here my security was his concern. I nodded my approval, trying to hide the fact that I was champing at the bit to head off into Accra in my crinkled trousers and sweat-stained bush hat. ‘Ah well, when in Rome,’ I thought, and prepared to be a dutiful guest.

Walking through the front door was like walking into a box of chocolates. A large dresser separating the lounge from the dining room was packed to the gills with brass pots, cups, jugs and scales, cut glass, white ceramic figures and china plates that made it look like the land of milk and honey. The light in the middle of the ceiling was a glass chandelier of brass and frosted glass, reflecting light off the polished tiled-wood ceiling and onto rows of photos of Mr and Mrs Prempeh and family, propped up above the curtain rails around the inside of the room.

A hi-fi drooled out intensely easy-listening Muzak in the background, and dotted round the room I could see five, maybe six fluffy teddy bears, along with a huge foot-and-a-half high teddy bear card on the table, proclaiming, ‘To a special couple, Merry Christmas.’ And sitting on the couch, beaming her welcoming and larger-than-life smile, was Mrs Prempeh.

‘Hello Mr Moxon,’ she said. ‘Please come in.’

And so we chatted while I drank the customary glass of water before moving onto the equally customary soft drink (or, in my case, a beer, to help me slip into cocktail-party mode; thankfully Mrs Prempeh also had a beer, so I wasn’t making a faux pas as I might have been had I asked for a beer in a Muslim household). We talked about families, girlfriends, travelling and so on, and when they found out that I was born on a Saturday, they christened me Kwame; everyone in Ghana is very aware of which day of the week they were born on, and they get a specific name depending on that day. The Saturday name is Kwame, so I became Kwame Mark. Soon enough, though, we got to the subject that other travellers in Ghana had warned me would crop up sooner or later.

‘So, Mark, I have one question for you that I hope you don’t mind me asking,’ said Mrs Prempeh.

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Fire away.’

‘Are you a Christian?’ she asked.

Uh-oh, I thought, what’s the best answer here? In some countries it’s a legal obligation for citizens to believe in God – it doesn’t matter which god, just as long as you believe in one of them – and if you turn up as a visitor and say you’re an atheist or an agnostic, then this is often interpreted as meaning you are a communist; it’s not a particularly recommended move. I don’t think it’s quite as formal in Ghana, but given the massive influence of Jesus on the shop-naming industry and the ubiquitous use of the phrase ‘God willing’ among Ghanaians, I reckon it’s a safe bet to assume that atheists and agnostics are regarded as pretty strange beasts. I decided to play it cool.

‘I was baptised into the Church of England,’ I said, truthfully. ‘And I pray every now and then – probably not as much as I should, but I definitely pray.’ After all, I thought, I’d spent most of the journey from Ouaga to Kumasi praying for a smooth ride and no accidents, and I reckoned that should count for something.

‘That is good,’ said Mrs Prempeh, satisfied. ‘If you let Jesus into your life then he rewards you so much, and it’s so important to pray. I have a prayer book I can give you to help with your praying; I’ll look for it later.’

‘You’re too kind,’ I said, bowling myself over with accuracy. ‘Thank you.’ And that, it seemed, was that.

It also turned out that Mr Prempeh hadn’t been the Attorney-General of Ghana, he’d been the Auditor-General of Ghana, which made me much more comfortable; I’ve never really been into law but I can understand numbers and accounting, and I have a much better idea of what an Auditor-General does than an Attorney-General. Accounts need auditing, whether you’re a small company or a government, and the Auditor-General is basically in charge of auditing Ghana’s public accounts, but as I was to discover, that only scratches the surface of Mr Prempeh’s life story.

The Auditor-General

I wasn’t prepared for the extent of Mr Prempeh’s achievements, or for the amazing modesty he constantly displays. Over the course of my visit I’ve managed to prise the details of his exploits out of him, but I’ve had to ask the right questions; some people who have achieved a lot in life take no more than a gentle prod before they launch into long, pompous speeches about the dizzy heights they’ve reached and just how important they are, but Mr Prempeh has been, from the start, a congenial host who doesn’t let on about anything unless I ask him about it. The fact that everyone in the house, from house maid to family, calls him ‘Daddy’ only made my discoveries of his past all the more amazing.

Born in Kumasi on 20 April, 1937, Osei Tutu Prempeh got an A-level in Science in 1954 with the intention of joining the medical profession; back in 1954 most people didn’t take A-levels, let alone those in Africa, so this was no mean feat in itself. However what he calls his ‘burning desire to serve my country and be of service to mankind’ persuaded him to join the Audit Department, who were looking for promising young men to join its ranks, so in December 1955 he signed up with the colonial civil service and started to climb the ladder to the top.

In the July 1961 professional auditing exams the 24-year-old Osei Tutu Prempeh came top in the entire country, gaining him the official title of Auditor, from which he progressed over the next 28-and-a-half years through Senior Auditor, Principal Auditor, Assistant Director, Director of Audit and Deputy Auditor-General to reach the top as Auditor-General in January 1990. Ascending the ranks in the Ghanaian Audit Department isn’t easy; every year there are confidential assessments on all staff in the service, and when vacancies appear the best candidates are picked depending on these assessments, so when Mr Prempeh says ‘I worked my way up’ he means it quite literally. While working at the Audit Department Mr Prempeh attended various courses in accounting and auditing, including a year’s course at Strathclyde University, and numerous courses in Miami. Given his performance in the Auditor exams, it’s not surprising that his rise through the ranks was one of the fastest ever within the service. Of course, he deflects all this with typical modesty.

‘I got there by God’s grace,’ he says, ‘and hard work and a lot of sacrifice. I’ve spent a lot of time being lonely in hotels, away from my wife – I remember one time when the woman at immigration took my passport and looked through it, and she said: “Mr Prempeh, does your wife ever see you?” “Well, we talk on the telephone a lot,” I said, but the point was well made.’

Getting to the top might take a lot of hard work, but staying there is even tougher. The responsibility is huge; in December 1999 the National Audit Office had 1510 staff, with the Auditor-General being in charge of all of them, and the main responsibility of the department (and hence the Auditor-General) is, according to the Ghanaian constitution, to audit and report on ‘the public accounts of Ghana and of all public offices, including the courts, the central and local government administration, of the Universities and public institutions of like nature, [and] of any public corporation or other body or organisation established by an Act of Parliament.’ This essentially means compiling 14 annual reports for the Ghana government covering audits of all public ministries, departments, agencies and institutes, as well as all private companies with government investment; that’s an awful lot of auditing.

It’s even more impressive when you consider that when Mr Prempeh became Auditor-General in 1990, audit reports on the public accounts of Ghana were ten years behind schedule. Imagine that; the accounts of an entire country hadn’t been audited for the last ten years, something that is practically unheard of in the West. As a non-political post, the Auditor-General is independent of the often tumultuous political process, which meant that Mr Prempeh was able to criticise the government in his reports; this could be regarded as a dangerous occupation in Africa, but it seemed to work.

‘I was tough on the government,’ says Mr Prempeh, ‘but the truth and objectivity of my reports won through.’

It’s probably this objectivity, plus the fact that he was called on by the government to serve on no less than 11 committees and commissions (receiving letters of commendation for all of them) that helped push Osei Tutu Prempeh from the civil service in Ghana onto the international stage.

The United Nations

So far I’d been impressed enough with meeting the retired Auditor-General of Ghana, but over dinner on my first night in Ghana, I was bowled over. It turned out in casual conversation that not only had Mr Prempeh been Ghana’s Auditor-General from 1990 to his retirement in 2001, but he also served on the United Nations’ Board of Auditors from June 1990 to June 2000, the longest-serving individual since its inception in 1948.

Not only that, he chaired the three-person board for five of those years, which meant that he was effectively the man in charge of UN auditing during that time. The Board of Auditors comprises three Auditors-General (or equivalents) from member countries, and the auditing of all UN activities, programmes and funds across the world gets split between these three people, with the chairman managing the process. It’s a hell of a responsibility, but one at which Mr Prempeh obviously excelled.

I say this not because I know anything about international auditing, but because the United Nations voted on it. Every three years the General Assembly votes on whether it is satisfied with the performance of each of the three members of the Board of Auditors. If any aren’t satisfactory then they are replaced by someone from another country, but in his ten years of being Auditor-General of Ghana, Mr Prempeh was voted to remain as a member of the UN Board of Auditors three times on the trot, more than anyone else in the history of the organisation; Colombia holds the record for the longest term for a country, but Mr Prempeh holds the individual record, and when he retired, Ghana handed over its mandate to South Africa. In layman’s terms, this means that the United Nations thinks Osei Prempeh is a top-class auditor.

Just to add to the titles, Mr Prempeh was also a member and, for part of the time, the Vice-Chairman of the UN Panel of External Auditors, the Specialised Agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency, the mouthful that comprises auditors from all around the UN, including places like the World Health Organisation, the World Food Organisation, UNESCO and so on. And to cap it all, he was personally invited by Sir John Bourn, the Auditor-General of the UK, to join him together with the Auditor-General of France to serve on a pilot advisory scheme to the World Bank – the Multilateral Audit Advisory Group – which proved so successful that all three were made full consultants to the World Bank in July 1999.

His standing in the UN was so highly rated that when he suggested that the 40th session of the UN Panel of External Auditors, the Specialised Agencies and the International Atomic Energy Agency should be held in Accra in December 1999, the panel members unanimously agreed.

‘You are young and adventurous, Mark, and Africa doesn’t hold any fears for you,’ said Mr Prempeh. ‘It’s a different story for a panel of auditors, working from offices in New York, but they all said it was a great idea. This was the first time the session had been held in Africa, and it was a tremendous success, one of the best ever. The Auditors from the UK, Canada, France, the Philippines, Switzerland, Germany and South Africa all attended – plus Ghana, of course – and it was very memorable. They all came round my house and had a great time!’

As a result of his work, in December 1999 Mr Prempeh was given a Millennium Excellence Award for being an ‘Outstanding Statesman’, an award from the nation that was presented by the President. I ended up holding the award back in the Prempeh home; it wasn’t some wimpy gold-painted plastic trophy, but a classy-looking glass, wood and granite monster that weighed a ton. He also received a medal; quite right, too.

But out of all his achievements, Mr Prempeh is most proud of one that probably only means a lot to those who know the details about governmental auditing. It certainly sounds impressive.

‘I am most proud of what I managed to do for my country, internally, along with enhancing the image of Ghana on the international stage’ he says. ‘My work brought about enhanced transparency and accountability in the finances in the country, and this helped to get financing in from bodies like the World Bank. To culminate it all I was able to get a bill of mine passed by the government as Act 584, which incorporated the Audit Office’s role in the constitution, and extended the reports for which the service is responsible to include forensic, environmental and comprehensive auditing. So I managed to update the mandates for Ghana’s audit service to be up there with those of other countries, and the act became law on 10 October, 2000. I retired in October 2001 but stopped working in April 2001, as I had six months’ leave to take, so this is my legacy.’

And as if to rub it in, for the year ending 2001 his department was voted the ‘Best Auditor-General Service in Africa’; the award was collected by his successor, but it referred to the work done by the department under Mr Prempeh. That’s not bad for a self-made man.

A Right Royal Welcome

It was after a day of driving round the suburbs of Accra, with me effectively interviewing Mr Prempeh while trying not to slip too much into the traditional journalist-interviewee mode, that we settled down to a cup of tea to unwind in the tropical heat. The air conditioning was on and Mr Prempeh had peeled off his shirt to reveal a classic ‘man relaxing in his own house’ white vest underneath, and we were talking about his travels around the globe as an employee of the UN.

‘So, how many languages do you speak apart from English?’ I asked.

‘Ooh, a tiny bit of Italian,’ he said, ‘and some French, but it needs a lot of work. But that’s about it.’

‘Though you speak Ga as well,’ I said, referring to the local language used mainly in the area round Accra.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘and I speak Twi too, as I am originally from Kumasi, and that is what they speak there.’

‘Ah, Kumasi,’ I said, ‘the home of the Ashanti tribe.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr Prempeh. ‘Did you know I am a member of the Ashanti Royal Family?’

‘You are?’ I said, genuinely impressed.

‘My grandfather was King Prempeh I,’ he said, and my jaw dropped open. King Prempeh I is a legend in Ghana; he was exiled by the British in 1900 when the Ashanti rebellion was finally put down, and after initially being sent to Cape Coast he was exiled to Sierra Leone. However the Ashanti faithful were so keen to visit their king to pay homage that they walked all the way along the coasts of Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia to get to Sierra Leone, so the British finally moved him and his entourage to the Seychelles, where they stayed until the British let them return in 1924.

‘My father could speak the language of the Seychelles,’ says Mr Prempeh. ‘He was born there, while in exile.’

The bloodline of the Ashanti royal family runs through the maternal side, so the eldest son of the king’s sister becomes the next king. If the bloodline had run through the paternal side, then Mr Prempeh’s brother would be king; as it is, it makes him the second cousin of the late King Otumfuo Opoku Ware II, which is pretty impressive in anyone’s book. My genealogy isn’t good enough to work out his relationship to the current king, King Osei Tutu II, but I would think that the king’s uncle is Mr Prempeh’s second cousin. Or something like that, anyway.

‘I have the name of two Asantehenes combined,’ says Mr Prempeh, the Asantehene being the name for the king of the Ashantis. ‘The first king of Ashanti was King Osei Tutu – he became king when the Golden Stool came down from the heavens – and King Prempeh I was my grandfather. My daughter’s name – Nana Afua Kobi Serwa Ampim Prempeh – is the same as that of the Queen Mother, bar the Prempeh part, so she really loves her. Names are important; all my children have royal names.’

And so I found out that not only have I been staying in the house of the retired Auditor-General of Ghana, I’ve also been staying in the house of the longest-serving member of the United Nations Board of Auditors, who also happens to be a member of the Ashanti Royal Family. As Godfrey, Mr Prempeh’s current chauffeur, said to me when we got chatting in Mr Prempeh’s Range Rover, ‘He’s a very great man.’ You’re not wrong there, Godfrey.

Conversations with Daddy

Mr Prempeh and I have spent a lot of time talking, mainly because the Range Rover has developed some problems and his concerned advice is that I shouldn’t go into Accra without a guide at the very least, as some of the capital’s taxi drivers and touts are less than scrupulous and might try to harass me. I’ve heard that Accra is one of the safest capitals in West Africa, but local knowledge is always worth taking and I’m not going to argue with my host, so I’ve accepted that the best thing to do is to wait for the Range Rover to be fixed, and then we can see Accra properly. In the meantime I’ve been spending my days lounging round the house, writing, reading and slipping into the relaxed lifestyle of the retired elder statesman. I figure that it’s good for me; after multiple illnesses on the way to Accra, recuperation is the key, and the Prempehs are certainly feeding me well and looking after me in fine style.

The day starts off with Mr Prempeh’s daily routine, which I’ve been only too happy to join.

‘I have a morning ritual,’ explained Mr Prempeh on my first morning in his house. ‘I make myself a cup of tea and eat some fresh fruit out on the veranda, as we are now. Then I mix some bird seed with a little rice, like this, and then go outside into the garden. Here, come with me.’

I followed, dutifully, as we wandered out onto the front drive and into the shadow of one of the magnificent palm trees towering over the drive.

‘I love my trees,’ said Mr Prempeh, ‘and I often pray under this one.’ Saying this, Mr Prempeh closed his eyes and muttered some words under his breath, followed by ‘Amen’. Turning to me, he winked. ‘By the time you leave us, Mark, you will be a devout Christian.’

I smiled, wondering if even the miracle worker Himself could work a miracle that formidable, and then watched fascinated as Mr Prempeh re-enacted the parable of the sower in his front drive.

‘First of all I call the birds with a whistle, and they respond. Then I throw the seed in the same places every day,’ he said as he scattered the seed on the stony ground of the drive. ‘And every day the birds eat the seeds in the order I throw them. It’s incredible.’

We settled back down on the veranda, where Mr Prempeh started brewing the tea.

‘The tea is all part of the ritual,’ he said. ‘I can’t cook at all, but I can make tea, so that’s my job: I make tea.’

Pouring three cups of tea, he added unsweetened condensed milk and sugar, as is the Ghanaian way.

‘I make my wife a cup of tea every morning and bring it to her personally,’ he explained. ‘She likes that. And then I settle down to watch the birds come to eat the seed. I love it when they all flutter up into the air and slowly settle down again, every time someone moves. They’re mainly bush doves; they have the shape of a dove, but have a grey-purple colour, not white, and there are some smaller, red birds too.’

And saying that, the birds landed on the Prempeh’s drive, 30 or 40 bush doves pecking at the seeds and jumping at any sign of activity. Slowly they pecked their way along the drive, past the gleaming Range Rover that Godfrey had just finished polishing, and round to the door of Lady Pam’s Salon, the popular hairdressing and stylist business that Mrs Prempeh runs from the corner of the Prempeh compound.

‘We have another business too,’ said Mr Prempeh, following my gaze. ‘There is my wife’s salon, and we also have a business that hires out everything you need for a party – tables, chairs, lights, cutlery and so on – and it’s all stored round the back of the house. When I designed the house, I didn’t just plan for places like the prayer room, the video room, the dining room and so on, I donated a corner of the compound to my wife’s business. It’s important to have different ways of supporting yourself; nothing is ever certain, and it’s only by God’s grace that we are here.’

‘So how did you meet your wife, Mr Prempeh?’ I asked.

‘How did I meet my wife?’ he smiled. ‘I will do a deal with you; if you first tell me how you met your girlfriend, I will tell you how I met my wife.’

‘OK, it’s a deal,’ I said, and went on to explain my side of the bargain, trying to avoid getting too dewy-eyed with homesickness (though not entirely succeeding).

Then Mr Prempeh launched into his story. He lost his first wife in childbirth, during the birth of their fifth child (the child survived), and this obviously blew a hole in his life. Some time afterwards he had to go to school to pick up his children, but he arrived a little early and the school hadn’t yet closed, so he parked the car and sat in it, quietly waiting.

‘Then a girlfriend of mine – just a friend, you understand – came walking by, and she said: “Hey OT” – I am Osei Tutu, you see, which becomes OT – “Hey OT, why are you sitting there in the car all quiet?” So I said to her: “Have you not heard of my circumstances?” and she said: “No”, so I told her.

‘A short while later the same friend came round to visit me and happened to bring another friend with her, as this friend of hers had lost her husband also. Now when you have lost someone you don’t want to think about anyone else, but when I met this woman my heart started going boom-boom! boom-boom! and I thought: “What is happening here?” Soon afterwards she became my wife.

‘God works in mysterious ways: I was sad from my loss and she was sad from her loss, but together we are happy.’

It’s Mrs Prempeh (or ‘Mammy’, as everyone calls her) who’s responsible for the cuddly toys throughout the house (‘My wife,’ sighs Mr Prempeh, raising his eyes to the heavens while being obviously touched by the soppiness of the whole thing). Together they have seven children; there are the five children from Mr Prempeh’s previous marriage, and together Mammy and Daddy have had three children (though tragically one of them died). Most of the children are living abroad, but the house is far from empty; their daughter Nana Kobi still lives at home when she’s not at university in England, friends and relatives are always popping round, and on top of this there are the staff, from the house help to the chauffeur to the watchman.

But that’s not all. Mr Prempeh was very keen to show me round the gardens, and round the back of the house, past a rusting car, are, surprisingly, poultry batteries for up to 300 birds.

‘There is just one white turkey here at the moment,’ said Mr Prempeh, pointing at the solitary bird ducking under the low-hanging lights that, one hopes, keep chickens happy in cages like this. ‘We also have a live sheep over there, but the main thing is I like to grow plants that give you something you can eat. So I have a coconut tree in the front, as well as palm trees, paw-paw trees, oranges, plantains, mangoes and pears, and I just love to eat their fruit fresh from the tree.’

As we climbed onto the top of the house to survey the grounds from above, I could hear the yapping guard dogs out the back, and a solitary cat wandered by, mewing nervously round the grounds. I asked if Mr Prempeh had any other cats; I’m rather fond of them, and most of the cats I’ve seen in the Sahel have been scraggly little things, but this one looked well fed.

‘We used to have four,’ he said, ‘but the neighbours eat cats and three of them have gone. They set traps for them using meat and lines, and they catch them and eat them. So now he is the only one left, and he is a bit lonely.

‘Anyway, here is the roof, where I go walking every morning. My wife and I used to go for a walk along the road and back every morning, but since the President moved in round the corner, there are too many fast-driving commuters on the road and it’s not safe. So now Mammy takes the drive and I take the roof, and we walk up and down for 20 minutes to get our exercise.’

The morning routine also includes meditation and prayer, in the special prayer room opposite Mr Prempeh’s bedroom, and a session catching up on the news on CNN and the BBC.

‘I never travel anywhere without my short-wave radio and my Bible,’ Mr Prempeh told me. ‘Then I am never short of a companion.’

I asked Mr Prempeh what his memories of travelling were, and he went through a whole lifetime’s travels, covering more countries than I could place on the map; his work has taken him to a lot of Europe, Africa and North America, plus far-flung places like China, Japan, Russia, Brazil, Chile, Israel, Cyprus, Syria, Mexico, Jamaica, Antigua, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and more. But one thing really sticks in his mind from his travels.

‘The view from the plane is incredible,’ he recalls. ‘When you settle into your seat and the sun rises slowly over the horizon, it’s just amazing. The colours are stunning, just beautiful, all orange and red. It’s unbelievable.’

This sort of memory has obviously been earned. Hard work is a central theme of Mr Prempeh’s story, and it’s evident from the friendly advice he hands out.

‘My advice to you, Mark, is “all-out”,’ he said to me as we sat down in the garden with a beer one evening. ‘Whatever you do in life, go all-out and put your best efforts in.’

‘What, like no pain, no gain?’ I asked.

‘Exactly,’ said Mr Prempeh. ‘That is it. When you write your book, Mark, perhaps you will write a chapter about me, and put that in.’

Sure thing, Mr Prempeh. There you go.

Accra

Written: 20 December 2002

Because the Prempehs’ car was having some mechanical problems, my plans to explore Accra were rather severely curtailed. Mr Prempeh suggested that I explore the capital in the company of one of his drivers, but with the car unavailable things kept getting delayed.

My first tantalising glimpse of Accra was in the dark on the way from the bus station to the Prempehs’ house, but my first experience of Accra in daylight was a chauffeur-driven trip to the internet café and back. It soon became apparent that where I’m staying is completely different to central Accra, with its pollution, traffic and amiable chaos; the Airport Residential Area is to Accra what Kensington is to London, and the streets are wide, clean, empty and dotted with travel agents, internet cafés, well-stocked shops, medical clinics and embassies sporting palm trees and well-watered lawns. I marvelled at it, but like all relatively modern residential areas, it has yet to develop any soul. Suburbia is a great place to live; it’s not such a great place to hang out.

But hanging out was all I was able to do, so when Mr Prempeh suggested a drive on Tuesday afternoon, I was definitely up for it. It was only to deliver some papers and to have a couple of meetings with people over the repair work on the car, but we brushed against the capital’s ring road and I sensed that feeling of compacted humanity that makes African and Asian cities so fascinating to visit. From the comfort of an air-conditioned Range Rover places like Accra take on a wholly different aspect – being able to explore without breaking into profuse sweat every few steps is a luxury that’s hard to beat – and more than once it hit me that this is why the houses in the Airport Residential Area have razor wire and guard dogs; once you’ve settled into the padded seats of chauffeured transport, you don’t want to go back to sweating your way along the dusty streets of the city.

Nice Plot

By Wednesday the car was behaving better but was still not perfect, so instead of exploring Accra we spent the afternoon driving to a plot of land which Kwesi, my brother’s friend, has bought. It’s in a suburb called East Legon, not far from the University of Ghana, and Mr Prempeh proudly showed me the vista from the plot.

‘The airport is just over there,’ he pointed out. ‘This is great, because Kwesi loves planes, and we’re going to build a balcony facing the flight path, so when the planes go past he can watch them.’

It’s odd, the thought of someone actually wanting to watch the planes fly past – most people in Hounslow would rather the planes just buggered off and left them alone – but in all the time we plodded around Eddie and Nick’s plot, not one plane flew past. The flight path in Accra isn’t perceived as a Bad Thing; living close to the airport is seen as a positive benefit, and East Legon, in sight of the airport, is a very desirable address indeed.

‘At the moment the plot has just been levelled,’ said Mr Prempeh, showing me where the bulldozers had done their work. ‘We need to remove some old foundations of a building that was here before, but we’re nearly ready to start building.’

‘How long will it take?’ I asked.

‘That depends on how fast the cash flows in from England,’ he said. Of course, I thought – that’s how people build in Africa. They buy everything one bit at a time when they can afford it, rather than saving up and buying everything in one go, which is the norm in England. The main reason is cash flow; property and buildings are good investments in times of economic stress, so buildings go up in stages, often with long rest periods between. Half-built shells of buildings are incredibly common in West Africa, the steel rods from the concrete reinforcements sticking up into the sky like rusty lightning conductors.

But Nick and Eddie’s plot of land is a little dream. Give it a few years and the surrounding concrete shells will transform themselves into razor-wired fortresses of the rich and famous, and East Legon will be a paradise of suburban luxury. Even given the shakiness of the Ghanaian economic situation, it’s easy to see why you might want to buy a plot of land in Ghana. A few kilometres from the bustling heart of Accra, you can live in a cocoon of luxury, complete with your very own guard dogs, night watchmen and chauffeur-driven car. After the cramped life of London, it’s another world.

Accra, Finally

On the way back from Eddie’s plot Mr Prempeh took me round the grounds of the University of Accra and his old school Achimota School, the best school in the country, and at last I got a taste of something historic. Here were colonial-era buildings, extended and expanded over the years to accommodate more and more students, and the administration blocks and old school houses were beautiful. It only made me want to visit Accra even more, and finally, on Thursday, I got my chance.

This time the problem wasn’t with the Range Rover, which was humming along nicely, but with the lack of a driver. Godfrey had taken the day off, so as a compromise one of the house staff took me to the taxi rank round the corner from the house and found me a respectable taxi driver to take me into town. As long as I rang the Prempehs from time to time during the day to say I was safe, everyone would be happy, so I hopped in the taxi and felt the happy glow of being free to explore what I liked, when I liked.

Accra is a sprawling place, but it’s easy enough to explore on foot if you’ve got plenty of time. I asked the taxi driver to drop me at Independence Square, a huge open-air parade ground by the sea that smacks of post-colonial presidential rule; a massive concrete arch dominates the parade ground’s empty concrete stadia, while Independence Arch stands alongside in the middle of a nearby roundabout, celebrating Ghana’s independence in 1957. I wasn’t too bothered by the square itself, though it was a bizarre sight as the wind blew black plastic bags through the dusty expanse of the parade ground, but I did want to see the sea. Accra is a coastal city and I hadn’t seen the sea since the Gambia, and just behind Independence Square the Atlantic Ocean laps against the beach, alternately dumping and washing away streams of litter and refuse. It’s not the most pleasant beach experience on the planet (though the hundreds of school children leaping into the water didn’t seem to care) but I felt a sense of achievement at having reached water again; Mali had felt a long, long way from the sea.

Just along the coast from Independence Square lies the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, a tasteful homage to Ghana’s first President, who was ousted in the mid-1960s and spent the rest of his life in exile in Guinea. Nkrumah is going through a bit of a renaissance in Ghana, and his impressive mausoleum sits in green gardens round which parties of jabbering school kids wander; meanwhile, tucked away at the back, behind the mausoleum and the posed statue of Dr Nkrumah looking every inch the leader, is a museum to the first President’s life. It’s an eye-opener.

The museum doesn’t contain a great deal, but what it does contain are lots of photographs of Dr Nkrumah with some of the most famous people of the 20th century. I wandered through the photos, stunned at how many of the century’s most iconic people were pictured shaking hands with the founder of modern Ghana. There was Jawarharlal Nehru, Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, John F Kennedy, Sir Alec Hume, Queen Elizabeth II, Harold Macmillan, Pope Pius XII, President Nasser of Egypt, and countless leaders of countries like Malaya, Sri Lanka, Niger and Nigeria. I was impressed; as a tribute to Nkrumah, these photos are about as good as you can get.

After the peace of the Memorial Garden I plunged into the chaos of James Town, the run-down area of town that juts out on a small peninsula in southern Accra. At last I’d found a real piece of Africa among the posh suburbs and impressive monuments, for here the streets are packed with people, playing drums, shopping in markets and generally ambling round town in the way everyone does in the tropical heat. Little children waved ‘Hello obruni’ and I waved back; in Ghana obruni is the equivalent of toubab, and you hear it everywhere, especially in places like James Town. Right down at the water’s edge an old lighthouse looks over a squalid jetty that juts out into the sea, right next to James Fort, which is now a nasty-looking prison; it oozes atmosphere, and it’s a world apart from the Airport Residential Area, as the piles of rubbish and half-crumbling shacks demonstrate. I remembered a couple of English girls I’d met who were living in James Town, and they described their address as ‘past the lake of human shit and next to the goat market.’ That sums it up rather well; it’s a great place to explore.

North of James Town lies the main market in town, and just walking through the melee took an hour. Everything spills out onto the street – hawkers, pedestrians, stalls, you name it – and it’s a colourful chaos where you can buy practically anything. I’m not that fussed by the shopping aspect of markets as I rarely buy anything and I’m an incredibly lazy negotiator, but wandering through a market like Accra’s is an experience in itself, if only because of the tide of humanity that sweeps you along, dodging the traffic and ducking to avoid the huge bundles that the women carry on their heads. I thought it was great; this was the Accra I’d been looking for, and I was glad I wasn’t experiencing it through the air-conditioned window of a car. Besides, the people of Accra are friendly in a way you don’t associate with big cities, and I was only hassled once in the whole day’s wandering. After Dakar and Bamako, that’s a serious luxury, shit or no shit.

Kokrobite

Written: 21 December 2002

When I mentioned to the Prempehs that I wanted to stay in Kokrobite (pronounced ‘Cock-rah-bee-tee’) for Christmas, I’m sure I got a funny look; I also mentioned it on the phone to Kwesi when he rang up his aunt and uncle for a chat, and he just laughed. I couldn’t understand why; all the way down through Mali and Burkina Faso I bumped into people who’d come the other way from Ghana, and whenever I mentioned that I was heading down to the Ghanaian coast for Christmas, people kept recommending Big Milly’s Backyard in Kokrobite. How can you ignore travellers’ advice like that?

Yesterday I took a taxi all the way from Accra to Kokrobite, because Mr Prempeh said he would feel happier knowing I’d arrived safely, but that was where my Accran luxury stopped and a new kind stepped in: the luxury of the beachside travellers’ joint. Kokrobite is a small village right by the sea, and hidden in its suburbs and right on the beach is Big Milly’s Backyard. Started in 1995 by an English woman called Wendy and her Ghanaian partner Seto, Big Milly’s (or Wendy’s Place as it’s also known) is a simple block of land behind the beach, maybe 100m wide and three times that deep, that’s dotted with tall coconut palms, squat palm trees, bushes and trees. Hidden among the copious greenery are lots of pretty little thatched huts, some bucket-shower blocks, a bar, a chill-out area, a couple of viewing towers and a restaurant overlooking the beach, and it’s all delightfully clean and pleasant. It’s got just what I need to kick back and relax: everything I buy is bought on account, which I’ll settle when I leave, so I don’t have to carry money around and there’s never an excuse for not going to the bar; there’s a live band every Saturday night, and over the Christmas period you apparently can’t move for drummers, bands and dancers; the food is quite, quite excellent and very good value; and down on the beach there’s a friendly bunch of Rastafarians, where those who want to can get stoned on the local grass for an absolute pittance. As a recipe for relaxation it’s pretty excellent, and as a recipe for hedonism it’s pretty damn good too; perhaps that’s why the Prempehs gave me that funny look.

I’m going to do nothing for days and days except sit, read, write, eat, drink and meet people. I need a break from travelling, I need to feed myself back up after being ill from Dogon to Kumasi, and I need company; happily, I’m finding all of these in Kokrobite. I’ve already met some wonderful people, I’m relaxed enough to get my head together, and I hope that this will help reignite the travelling spark that went out, ooh, back in Senegal.

There’ll probably be precious little to say about my time in Kokrobite, and that, I guess, is the whole point of the place. How wonderful it is to be able to stop thinking for a week or so, while the sea laps against the beach, echoing off yet another bottle of ice-cold beer.

It makes Mopti feel a long, long way away.

Turtle Wars

Written: 22 December 2002

‘Oh man, it’s really sick,’ said one of the girls as she plonked down into one of the deckchairs in the bar at Big Milly’s Backyard. ‘There’s a turtle on its back on the beach, and it’s all bleeding. It’s horrible.’

Unfortunately this isn’t an uncommon occurrence in Kokrobite. From August to March the beach is a nesting site for sea turtles, and although turtles are a protected species and it’s illegal to harm them, it doesn’t stop man and turtle clashing in a bloody mess. The sign outside Big Milly’s might say ‘Turtle Nesting Site: Keep the beach clean, don’t collect their eggs, kill them or trap them’, but if you’re a local fisherman, you’re going to be far more concerned with the survival of man than the survival of the turtle.

Turtles suffocate when they’re turned on their backs, as their heavy intestines crush their lungs into the top of the shell, slowly killing them; with this as motivation, it didn’t take long for Wendy to drum up a team of young, strapping lads to wander down the beach, turn the beast over and carry it back into the sea. ‘But don’t bring any valuables with you,’ she warned. ‘Things might get a bit heated.’

The relationship between the obrunis of Big Milly’s and the fishermen of the local village isn’t that good, though I never found out why. You’re warned not to take anything onto the beach – even a towel – or it may well get stolen, and most obrunis hardly ever leave the safe haven of Milly’s compound, but the fishing village is quite a long way down the beach, so interaction is minimal. When it happens, though, it’s electric.

Some ten minutes down the beach we found a large group of locals crowded round a massive six-foot-long leatherback turtle, one of the rarest turtles in the area. A few obrunis were already there and had managed to flip the turtle back over, but it just sat there on the sand, weakly flicking its flippers, unable to push itself back down the beach. The obrunis were arguing with the locals; there was a problem.

The story, according to the fisherman who was shouting the loudest, was that this turtle had got stuck in his net, ruining it in the process, and that he was going to kill it and sell it to pay for the damage done to his livelihood. Wendy, an old hand in these discussions, asked to see the broken net, but all the fisherman could come up with was an ancient bundle of rope that had obviously been sitting on the beach for months. There was something fishy going on here, and when the fisherman demanded a fee of 10,000 cedis to put the turtle back into the sea – theoretically as compensation for his net – culture clash set in. It was pretty obvious by this stage that the turtle had crawled up the beach to lay its eggs, and the fisherman had seen the opportunity to flip it over, either to kill it and eat it, or to use it as a bargaining chip with the bleeding-heart obrunis who would no doubt wander down from the local hotel. The broken net was obviously a cover story.

Unfortunately for the fisherman the obruni posse outnumbered the locals, and slowly but surely the burliest white men started dragging the turtle towards the sea. At one point the fisherman and his mates tried pushing the turtle back up the beach in a sick tug-of-war, with the turtle flopping sadly in the middle of it all, but by now most of the locals were arguing to put the turtle back in, and some swift and not-too-serious fisticuffs saw the fisherman give up his prize, though not without a lot of shouting. Ten minutes later the turtle reached the sea and slowly lumbered off into the deep, its egg-laying mission scuppered for now; the only evidence of anything untoward was the gaggle of arguing humans back on the beach, where the more evangelically ecological obrunis had decided to ride back to Big Milly’s on their ideological high horses, dispensing conservationist wisdom to everyone en route.

The problem with slagging off the locals for their lack of ecology is that to them, turtles are fair game. Out here, if you catch something then you own it, and the concept of ecological conservation is not only completely unheard of, it’s totally inapplicable. It might technically be illegal to kill turtles in Kokrobite, but the policing isn’t heavy, and when you’re a poor fisherman trying to make ends meet, it’s a case of the turtle’s survival or yours. Nothing here is black and white; we were altruistically saving the life of an endangered species, a worthy cause indeed, but to the fisherman we were interfering in his life. My sympathy for him faltered when he started trying to charge us for putting the turtle back in the sea – that’s exploitation, plain and simple – but it’s a good example of how futile it is to try to apply western morals to the African way of life.

I guess the only way to tackle it is to shrug your shoulders, try not to offend too many people, and just drag the turtle back into the sea. And then you have to accept that it will keep on happening until the local fishermen of Ghana are as rich as we are; then they too can afford the luxury of looking at things from the animal’s perspective. We have a long, long way to go before conservation becomes an option for the whole world.

Trucked Off

Written: 23 December 2002

One afternoon, as I was lazing in a beach hut on Kokrobite Beach, the trucks rolled into town, and from the instant they started disgorging their sweaty contents, I was fascinated. For these trucks weren’t just any trucks, they were trans-African tourist trucks, and they blew my mind.

Every year a large number of trucks leave London to drive all the way to Cape Town, taking around nine months to snake through Europe and West Africa before crossing through Sudan into Ethiopia and Kenya, and then down the well-travelled route to South Africa. It’s a fantastic way to see the continent, and it removes all the hassle and expense associated with doing it yourself on public transport, but there’s no doubt that most independent travellers look at these buses and wince. It’s not hard to see why.

Imagine being stuck in something like the big, blue Truck Africa behemoth that rolled into Big Milly’s Backyard a few days before Christmas. 29 people (including the guide and driver) spilled out of this big blue beast, and for three days I watched them go about their business with the same fascination I reserve for those displays they have in museums, where ants live in a nest squashed between glass panels. These people live in each other’s hair, sharing the cooking and cleaning duties, camping in closely pitched dome tents and rattling for long periods along the roads of Africa, all crammed together in the back. In a group that big you’re bound to get some friction, and the politics of the whole situation kept me spellbound like a soap opera.

The second truck was a smaller, redder affair, carrying only 19 people, but they were equally interesting. I talked to quite a few people from this bus, and it turned out that things hadn’t been going too smoothly within the group and there’d been quite a few stand-up rows, so much so that some people were about to leave the bus early to fly home. The big blue truck seemed much more relaxed, and this sums up the gamble you take when you jump on a trans-African trip; if you get a good group of people, it must be a magical experience, but being cooped up in a truck for nine months of hell with a bunch of people whom you can’t stand... well, it doesn’t bear thinking about.

I was lucky enough to have a couple from one of the trucks staying in the room next to mine; they were obviously sick of sleeping in dome tents, and opted instead for the luxury of a bed during their Kokrobite stay. I was pleased that they’d gone for this option, because they would sit in their room, the door carelessly open, and talk for hours about how irritating so-and-so was, and how the guy who snored really badly never pulled his weight around the camp. I had no idea who anyone was, and I only caught the odd phrase as the sea breeze changed direction to blow their conversation my way, but it was as vitriolic and analytical as the worst office politics. It was brilliant.

Truck Life

I only watched the trucks and talked to the participants, so there was no way in which I could really experience what it must be like to be cocooned on a trans-African truck for so long, but there’s no doubting that they’re part of a slick operation. The trucks themselves are monstrous, with huge tyres, copious spares on the back and engines that shake the ground in a way that means business. The 19-person red truck was pretty basic, with the back cabin covered by a domed tarpaulin and precious little else, but the blue truck was a step up in luxury (though it also held ten more people, so perhaps ‘luxury’ is the wrong word). It had two floors, one in the rear and the other just behind the top of the front cabin, though whether this created any more space, I don’t know; everyone seemed pretty crammed in when they arrived. Both trucks were smothered with lockable compartments containing all sorts of things like tents, cutlery, cooking utensils, the herb rack and so on, and by this stage the entire crew knew where everything was; trucks obviously have routines.

Something else they have along with routines are rotas, and while the truckers were relaxing in the bar, there would be a steady stream of people wandering over, saying things like, ‘Mike, is it your turn to chop the tomatoes? We’re ready for you now.’ I guess that’s the only way to run what is effectively a self-sufficient crew that cooks for itself, sets up its own camp and has to look after itself in environments that are often a long way away from the luxury of Kokrobite; these trucks may provide a safe haven and a less immersed travelling experience than going alone, but they still make an impressive journey through some of the harshest environments on the planet, and that’s no mean feat. The price is having to behave like a bunch of mature schoolchildren on a school trip, a price that quite a few people are obviously happy to pay.

It would drive me completely insane, though, to be stuck on a bus with the same people for months. I’d end up escaping from yet another idiotic neighbourly comment by jumping off in some backwater, which would make the whole thing rather pointless; but sometimes, when I’m feeling lonely, feeling ill or just suffering from a lack of drive, taking a truck across Africa sounds like the perfect way to travel. Someone else takes care of the itinerary for you, someone else sorts out the visas for you, the pre-pay nature of the journey makes it easy to budget, and you’re never on your own. I’d never survive on a trans-African truck, but sometimes I quite fancy a few days on one, just for the experience.

Truck Off

Sadly the trucks only stopped in Kokrobite for a few days, and they soon raised anchor and floated off down the coast for Christmas. I’d rather enjoyed talking to the truckers, but possibly more interesting was the attitude of the other guests at Big Milly’s towards them.

For example, the overland clique – those who have their own transport and are driving overland through Africa – looked on the trucks with utter derision, praying that they’d leave for Christmas and stop making the place feel so darn touristy. It’s interesting, but overlanders often fall into the ‘holier than thou’ trap, possibly because having your own transport is the ultimate way to explore. I often wish I had a Land Rover to explore Africa with; public transport is so bloody awful and restrictive that a car is a genuine advantage, and it’s a painful experience to listen to your average overlander rattle on about all the amazing places they’ve visited (all of which, of course, you can only reach with your own transport). Their cliquishness is actually a good thing sometimes; it keeps them away from me, with my far less impressive itinerary.

On the other extreme the VSO volunteers I met in Kokrobite were fascinated and thought the trucks were a wonderful idea. Then again, most of the VSO contingent had been stuck in rural northern Ghana for the last year or two, and after an experience like that, a trans-African truck must appear as awe-inspiring as a supermarket, a decent pizza or an ice-cold beer. Judging by the merry way they all guzzled their way through the luxuries of life in Big Milly’s backyard, being out in the sticks with the VSO is a far harsher life than a trans-African truck journey.

I tend to go for the latter opinion – I quite like the trucks – though I’d never apply to go on a truck myself; you can be all snobbish about how easy life is in a truck, and that it’s not real travelling, but who cares? At least the truckers are seeing Africa, and most of them seemed pretty happy to me. Still, travellers can be a snobbish lot, and trans-Africa trucks come pretty low down the imagined hierarchy, somewhere above package tourists, but way below backpackers and overlanders. They’re damn entertaining, though; I thoroughly enjoyed watching the soap opera.

A Change of Heart

Written: 23 December 2002

I’d been really hoping that a Christmas break in Kokrobite would recharge my physical and mental batteries, which would in turn unearth the travelling spark that I’ve always had on my previous trips. What I didn’t realise is that I’d have lots of time to sink myself deeper and deeper into the emotional hole I’ve been digging for myself since leaving home.

When I arrived here, Kokrobite was full of people, but because most of them were from the trans-Africa trucks, and most of the rest of the residents were couples or groups of some kind, I still felt pretty lonely. I made some friends, but a lot of the time I was free to relax by myself, which meant I was able to sit and stew on just how much I miss Peta. Even when great things happened – such as sitting on the beach with a group of friendly people, listening to impromptu drum concerts in the moonlight – I couldn’t think of anything except how great it would be to be sharing this with my girlfriend. I tried to write, and found that for the first time in ages, it felt like work, not pleasure. I went swimming in the sea, and discovered how boring it is without someone to splash. I sat in my room listening to the World Service, and every time they read out the postal address – Bush House, London, England – I instinctively thought of home. Instead of relaxing in paradise by the sea, I was driving myself nuts. There were no two ways about it; I was lovesick, and Christmas was only going to make it worse.

Salvation came in the form of John, Rowena and Mike, who had driven from England in a Land Rover, and who proved to be excellent company. We chatted away in the bar at Big Milly’s, and it turned out that Mike, a Canadian traveller who’d joined up with John and Rowena in Morocco, was looking for someone to team up with after Christmas to explore the Ghanaian coast, at exactly the time I was planning to head there myself. This sounded like a plan; I could relax until after Christmas, and then try to get back into the travelling lark before flying out of Ghana in February. Perhaps things would take off after the festive season.

The next morning I grabbed some breakfast and bumped into John and Mike, who were getting ready to leave for another spot down the coast.

‘It’s paradise over in Busua, Mark,’ said John, and proceeded to describe a perfect beach, with an idyllic island not far off shore that was ideal for snorkelling. He described a place not unlike Big Milly’s, but which was even more secluded and a great spot for Christmas. Basically, he sold it to me, and then added, ‘You can come along if you like. It’d be fun.’

I weighed it up for about a minute, and figured that if I went with them then I’d have good company for Christmas, I’d have someone to travel with after the festive season had ended, and I’d get to see some of the coast in a vehicle that would get me off the beaten track. It sounded great; I said I’d just check that it was OK with the hotel management if I left early, as I’d booked in for a whole week. I was suddenly part of a new group, and it felt good.

Paying the bill was no problem, and I wandered over to John’s truck and told them I’d be 15 minutes, as I had to pack. ‘No problem,’ said John. ‘We’ve got some things to do here anyway, so there’s no rush.’

But I wanted to get on the road again, now I’d been all fired up, so I ran back to my room and started packing. I hadn’t been expecting to leave so soon so my stuff was all over the place, but packing is my speciality, and 15 minutes later I’d shoehorned everything into my pack and dragged it out into the sun. Blinking, I thought I’d taken a wrong turn, as John’s Land Rover had disappeared; but no, that was where they’d been parked, and they were nowhere to be seen. I was a bit stumped; where were they?

I wandered over to the bar to see if they were waiting at the gate, and one of the guys behind the bar said, ‘Hey Mark, where have you been?’

‘I’ve been packing,’ I said. ‘Have John and Rowena gone?’

‘Yes, they just left,’ he said. ‘They were running round the camp looking for you, but then they just left.’

‘They left already?’ I was stunned. ‘But I’ve checked out of my room and they said they’d wait for me. Why didn’t they come and find me?’

‘They didn’t know which room you were in,’ he said. ‘They tried to find out, but couldn’t find you.’

And with that I realised that the chance of grabbing a great Christmas down the coast had just left without me, fairly inexplicably. I felt completely and utterly rejected, the last thing I needed in my state.

A Moment of Clarity

I didn’t know what to do, so I went back to the office, got my room back along with commiserations from the sympathetic staff, and plonked my bag back on the bed. I figured I’d go back to my original plan for the day – trying to ring home before Christmas, when the telecentres would all be closed – so I wandered into the village and tried to call my parents and Peta. It took two hours and two telecentres to get absolutely nowhere (the lines were constantly engaged), so by lunchtime I was back in my room, wondering which god I’d managed to offend this time.

So I pulled out my pictures of Peta and settled down for a good, long cry. It didn’t fix anything but it sure made me feel better, and it made me realise that unless something truly spectacular and unexpected happened in the next few days, I was going to be returning to Accra, buying a flight to London, and aborting this awful, solitary nightmare for my old life. I’d hoped – and expected – that travelling alone would be as good an experience as it used to be. I now realise that however good the travelling, I just can’t handle being alone. I want my girlfriend here, and as I can’t have that, I want to be where my girlfriend is. My priorities have changed; travelling comes second to Peta, and until I can combine the two, I’d rather be at home with her.

At least my time in Kokrobite helped me realise this, once and for all. There’s no doubt in my mind that back in the desert the Lariam affected me in a very palpable way, but underlying the chemical effect was this growing realisation that I can’t do solo travel any more; it just hurts too much. It took a place like Kokrobite, and the awful feeling of being rejected and alone, to make me realise just how little I’ve enjoyed travelling this time round.

The upshot is that I’ve decided to come home. In my original plan I needed to fly from Accra to Nairobi to cross over to the East African leg of my journey, but instead I’m going to fly from Accra to London, and take it from there. I can easily buy a flight to Nairobi to continue my trip, but whether I will depends on what happens back home. Making that decision has taken two-and-a-half months of soul-searching and scraping the bottom of the barrel, but after that length of time travelling, I know the root cause of all my angst. I’m in love and I want to be back home with Peta.

It’s the surprise of this realisation that is the strangest part. I have always thought of myself as a traveller rather than anything else, and I’ve always viewed my fly-by-night careers as a means to an end, that end being saving up for my next trip. I’ve felt like this since I started really getting into travelling back in 1995, and I’ve always had this trip to Africa as my goal. Now I’m actually on it, and I hate it and want to come home. I’m reeling from the shock; suddenly I’ve found that one of the cornerstones of my life is shaky.

On the other hand, as I keep telling myself, I’d rather be in the situation where I’m lovesick and pining for my girlfriend than being the single guy I was for the three years of my last trip. My days of year-long solo trips might be over for now, but that doesn’t mean I’ll stop travelling. I don’t think you ever really do.

But first I need to come home and sort out my priorities. Perhaps I’ll look on this day as the moment I finally realised I’m putting down roots. If so, I hope the above doesn’t sound as corny then as it does right now.

Rastafarian Christmas

Written: 25 December 2002

The person with whom I clicked over Christmas was Lukas, a Swiss guy whom I met in the bar at Big Milly’s, and with whom I shared a passionate disappointment in Francophone West Africa. By the time I turned up at Kokrobite, Lukas had already been hanging around for a month, learning the drums in the nearby Academy of African Music and Arts; he was staying in the village with a friend, and he gave me a link, however tenuous, with the world outside the walls of Big Milly’s. There’s no doubt that a visit to Big Milly’s is completely unrepresentative of Ghana as a whole (though it certainly accentuates the positives, such as the friendly people) but as I’d hardly left the compound since arriving, except to make phone calls and buy water, anything that helped me pretend that I was still actually travelling was a bonus.

So on Christmas Eve, as I was sitting on the beach with Lukas and the Rastafarian drummers who pound continually just outside Big Milly’s, I was delighted to be invited to Christmas lunch at Lukas’s friend’s place.

‘Mark will join us too,’ said Lukas to his mate. ‘Mark, I’d like you to meet my friend Holy – it’s his place where I’m staying.’

‘Hello Holy,’ I said. ‘Cool name.’

‘It’s short for Holy Positive,’ said Holy.

‘Holy Positive,’ I said. ‘Nice one. It’d be an honour to come to Christmas lunch with you.’

‘Rastafari[1],’ said Holy, and took a big drag on his fat joint. ‘We see you tomorrow, man.’

‘You sure will,’ I said, and so began my first Rastafarian Christmas.

Late Lunch

I met Lukas on the beach around midday on Christmas Day, and we sat round and soaked up some drumming while Christmas happened lazily around us. Beach Christmases are strange beasts; it never feels like Christmas when the sun is baking down and the sea is breaking on the sand, but it does feel like a particularly good excuse for a party, and people wandered the beach with piña coladas in hand, sporting Santa hats and sun tans and doing absolutely nothing wherever possible. As Christmas venues go, the beach is never going to be quite the same as home, but there’s a lot to be said for waking up on Christmas Day and plunging into a warm Atlantic Ocean.

Around one o’clock we decided to wander over to Holy’s place to see what the plan was. Remember that this is Rastafarian Africa, where plans take on a whole new meaning; planning in Africa is pretty damn difficult (some might say futile) but planning in Rastafarian Africa is a complete mystery, so we went via another friend’s house, Kojo’s place, to see if anyone else was there. Kojo’s place is a kind of meeting place in the village, a tiny shop tucked behind the banana trees that’s normally got something happening, and that’s where we tracked down Kingdom, another Rasta who was going to Holy’s for lunch.

‘Hey Kingdom,’ said Lukas.

‘Rastafari,’ said Kingdom, and we all shook hands in the funky Ghanaian manner; you shake hands normally, and as you pull your hands away, you take the other person’s index finger between your index finger and thumb and click your fingers. They do this in Burkina Faso too, but you don’t get it in the Sahel countries and it’s not the sort of thing you’d use in high society in Accra; it suits the beach perfectly, though.

We sat around for a bit, watching progress on the building work that Kojo was having done in his back garden – and which was coming along nicely, even on Christmas Day – and after Kingdom had bought some herbs and spices for the Christmas lunch, we wandered over to Holy’s place.

Things take their time in the land of the Rastas, and instead of the normal frenetic activity you associate with kitchens at Christmas, there was a lot of lounging around to do. The sun was high in the sky; what better excuse for some drumming, some relaxing reggae in the background, and some slow, Rastafarian conversation? Absolutely.

Rastas in Ghana speak in a wonderful patois, and their philosophy on life is truly something to behold. No doubt influenced by the copious amounts of marijuana they smoke – a Rasta breakfast consists of two mangoes and two joints, as all-night revellers on the beach discover if they’re still conscious the next morning – the Rastas of Kokrobite are friendly, happy and utterly, utterly out there. Their philosophy is hard to pin down through the haze, but when Holy sat up on the beach one night and slapped away a mosquito, he summed up the Rasta’s chilled out view on life perfectly.

‘I don’t understand mosquitoes,’ he said, in as exasperated a voice as your average Rasta can muster (that’s not very exasperated, but bear with me). ‘They just don’t want us to feel free.’

Rastafarian timekeeping is equally trippy, in that it doesn’t seem to exist. The most popular phrase you’ll hear round the beach is the Ghanaian staple ‘I go and come’, which means that the person is just off somewhere, and will return at some unspecified time in the future. In Kokrobite everyone is constantly going and coming, which could explain why nobody is in the right place at the right time; indeed, having a right place and a right time is a concept that’s peculiar to the westerner, and it certainly doesn’t appear to exist in the Rasta’s hazy lifestyle. It affects everyone, not just the Rastas; when the drumming band failed to turn up to play on the evening of Boxing Day – their car broke down and they tried to fix it instead of taking a taxi to the venue – the guy behind the bar simply said with a shrug, ‘The band is a bit delayed. They’ll be coming tomorrow.’

So it was absolutely no surprise to see that lunch was going to take some time, and it seemed right; in a Rasta Christmas things take as long as they take, and that’s the point. It’s the complete opposite to Christmas back home, when the cooking is all meticulously planned to deliver a huge meal, bang on time; I think Holy lit a fire around three o’clock to boil the rice, but that was just a nod in the general direction of meal preparation. Indeed, this hint of activity seemed like the perfect excuse for a swim, so Lukas and I headed back to the beach with a ‘We go and come’, and ten minutes later we were back in the bar at Big Milly’s, relaxing with a drink just to make sure things took their proper course.

Just then Kingdom wandered in, so while Lukas splashed around in the sea, I sat with Kingdom on the beach with the drummers, marvelling at how the Rastas could keep on smoking joint after joint and still remain compus mentis. Their stamina is truly born of excess; most of the obruni smokers roll joints from half tobacco and half grass, but not the Rastas, oh no. A pure grass joint is the only joint a Rasta knows, and they knock ’em out at a fierce rate; it’s a wonder they manage to achieve anything, if indeed they do.

But we were going to achieve something, so around five o’clock we wandered back to Holy’s, ready for some action. This consisted of sitting around in Holy’s garden, watching the dogs playing with the chickens, and kicking back as the pots boiled on the kerosene stove. Holy and Kingdom proved to be truly lovely people, and the time flew by until lunch was ready at half-past-six, by which stage my appetite had grown, shrunk, and grown again. I was starving.

And what a feast it was. I never worked out the name for the dish we had – it was only referred to as ‘something special’ during the afternoon – but it was delicious. We had rice balls (sticky rice compacted into a tough ball which you scoop up with your fingers and dip into the sauce) with a thick spicy tomato soup containing fish and meat. It sounds simple, but the taste was absolutely heavenly and I scoffed down a whole bowl with appreciative grunts. The meal might have been over in ten minutes, a pittance compared to the average four-course Christmas lunch back home, but it was, as they say round here, sweet.

Back to the VSOs

Full up and rested, Lukas and I decided to head back to Big Milly’s, where a reggae band was going to be playing; Holy and Kingdom said they’d wander down later – there’s no rush, remember – but now we’d lined our stomachs we were up for some Christmas revelry. What I’d forgotten, though, was that I’d also booked dinner at Big Milly’s, so five minutes after I walked through the gate, I was whisked off to my place at the table, ready for my second Christmas meal of the evening.

The second meal was a more traditional western affair, if you ignore the fact that we were eating by the light of kerosene lanterns under the palm trees. I amazed myself by continuing to eat handsomely, and ploughed through chicken, potatoes, vegetables and gravy like there was no tomorrow. I shared a table with the group of VSO volunteers who were all down from northern Ghana, and I think their utter enjoyment at eating food that wasn’t rurally Ghanaian rubbed off on me; I didn’t leave a thing on my plate, and when dessert came round (Christmas pudding and baked bananas in custard) I managed not only my plate, but my neighbour’s too. Gluttony, I decided, was my Christmas creed, and I threw myself into the hedonism of the Kokrobite Christmas with glee.

I have no idea how long the reggae band played for; I have no idea how many Guinnesses I drank, but seeing as Guinness in Ghana is 7.5 per cent alcohol, it was probably far too many; I can’t really remember what time I finally went to bed; but what I do remember is that I had a great time. The party went on pretty much all the way through to the end of Boxing Day, and ended up with a group of die-hards sitting in one of the towers overlooking the beach, drinking beer and singing songs along to an acoustic guitar that Ben, one of the VSOs, had brought along.

‘I’d like to dedicate this song to Ghana,’ said Ben, as we broke into another round of drinks. ‘It sums it up rather well.’ And with that he started playing ‘Nothing Ever Happens’ by Del Amitri:

And nothing ever happens

Nothing happens at all

The needle returns to the start of the song

And we all sing along like before

And we’ll all be lonely tonight

And lonely tomorrow

So it seems that the life of a Rasta is pretty similar to the life of a VSO in the far north. Nothing ever happens... and, generally, it’s a wholly positive thing.

[1] Pronounced ‘Rasta-far-eye’, with the emphasis on the ‘eye’.

Kakum

Written: 29 December 2002

Lazing in paradise for a couple of weeks is all very well if you can switch your brain off, kick back and do nothing without going stir crazy. I’ve never been very good at relaxing on the beach, though; there’s a constant danger of me becoming bored, and being bored is the worst affliction I can think of outside of being employed, so when Lukas started planning an overnight trip along the coast with Susie, a friendly German girl whom I’d met in Kumasi and who turned up at Big Milly’s for the festive season, I was all ears.

Unfortunately, planning when you’re lazing is a challenging process and procrastination is the order of the day, so it was no surprise to find ourselves sitting round after breakfast on Saturday, 28 December, totally unable to decide on what we should do. The broad plan was to head west along the coast to the town of Cape Coast, from where we could take a bus north to Kakum National Park, home to Ghana’s biggest remaining tract of tropical rainforest. The problem was deciding when to go, and it was only the fact that Susie had to visit somewhere else on Monday that persuaded us to get off our backsides and head out that very day.

Ideally, when trying to get around West Africa, it’s a good idea to leave early in the morning; because it gets so hot in the middle of the day, things tend to slow down a bit as the day wears on, and catching transport is slightly harder. Still, after over a week of inactivity I figured that any movement was a good idea, so I booked out of Big Milly’s for the night, shoved some essentials in my daypack, and met up with the other two at Kokrobite tro-tro station at one o’clock, ready to head back into the reality of Ghana.

Ghanaian transport falls into three categories: taxis, big buses, and tro-tros, the latter encapsulating everything that isn’t a taxi or a big bus, from minibuses to the kinds of back-breaking nightmares that I grew to loathe in Mali. Catching a tro-tro from Kokrobite to the main coastal road was no problem, but standing by the side of the road, yelling ‘Cape Coast’ at every passing tro-tro, yielded nothing but shakes of the head; I don’t know whether it was because we were too late in the day, or whether tro-tros that go that far along the coast are few and far between or always full, but we ended up having to take one tro-tro to a halfway point which didn’t appear on any of my maps, and then another one to Cape Coast. I’d been dreading this decision; in Mali and Senegal, things always went horribly wrong when I had to break my journeys up, as sitting round waiting for buses to fill in the Sahel is one of the staple occupations of the public transport traveller, but to my delight Ghana proved to be far more suited to the policy of leaving when full.

For a start, once we’d given up looking for direct tro-tros to Cape Coast, we simply hopped on the next one that came along, which took a wait of five minutes. Once that bus dropped us off in wherever-it-was and we found our way to the tro-tro park for Cape Coast, it was only another ten minutes before the next one came along and filled up, and we were off within a few minutes. This was too easy; indeed, the only irritation was the way everyone rushed at the tro-tro in one huge crush when it pulled in, necessitating scrum tactics I didn’t have to use in the Sahel. Sure, our late departure meant that we arrived in Cape Coast after the last tro-tro to Kakum had departed, but taxis in Ghana are relatively cheap, so we simply took one straight to Abrafo, the little village that lies 1km outside the park gates.

Incredibly we’d gone from dithering round the late-morning breakfast table to supper in Kakum, and it hadn’t been a strain. Even the tro-tros had been relatively comfortable; OK, you still have to wedge yourself in, but compared to the wooden benches of the north, it’s child’s play. It’s no wonder they call Ghana a perfect introduction to Africa; if getting round is always this much easier than in the Sahel, I’m in for a treat.

A Walk in the Park

The tourist rest house in which we found ourselves was, I presume, rather pleasant, but as we arrived after dark and the rest house had no electricity (it had light switches, yes, but no lights), I couldn’t really tell. There was, however, a little girl whose business sense was truly staggering to behold, and as she showed us to our room and explained the dinner and drink options, I found myself once again thinking just how wonderful it is to be able to talk to the Ghanaians, not only because English is the official language, but because they are such delightful people. Her charm worked; we decided to eat there and then, and settled down outside in the flicker of a kerosene lantern.

Here we met Ama, a Canadian aid worker who was also here to explore the park, and sitting next to her was a guide from the park itself. We’d been recommended to do an early morning walk through the forest to beat the rush of tourists; Kakum is open from 8am, but by prior arrangement you can enter the park earlier in the company of a guide, and that’s supposed to be the best time to search for animals. All four of us wanted to do such a walk, and our guide explained that a two-hour walk would be best; this would give us enough time to track down some wildlife, and afterwards we could head off to the park’s world-famous canopy walkway for sunrise. This all sounded excellent.

Or it did until we sat down to work out the logistics. If we wanted to be at the walkway for 6am, then we’d have to start walking at 4am, which meant leaving the rest house at 3.30am, which would mean getting up at about 3.15am. As this was the kind of time I’d been going to bed since slipping into the hedonism of Kokrobite I was a little nervous that I’d end up getting no sleep at all, but you don’t trek along the coast just to sleep through the experience, so we went for it. A 3.15am wake-up call it was, then.

I hate mornings; I think I always have, though in reality it probably only started kicking in when I became a teenager and discovered the delicious feeling of waking up early and rolling right back to sleep again, safe in the knowledge that you don’t have to get up if you don’t want to. Mornings physically hurt my head and it takes at least an hour for me to gain any semblance of civility, so when we got up at 3.15am, I still had quite a few hours to go before I could be called human. Luckily I wasn’t alone; we were uniformly silent as we trudged the half-hour road to the park entrance.

Despite the sludge of missed sleep clogging up my mind, I loved that little walk. Under a half-crescent moon we padded our way through the village, avoiding chickens and enjoying the solitude, and as we left civilisation behind and the road entered the forest, it felt beautiful. It was humid – Kakum has 90 per cent humidity for most of the year – but it wasn’t hot, and the slight chill in the air was beautifully refreshing after the sun-baked journey of the day before. It was almost a shame to arrive at the rainforest proper; the breeze died, the humidity shot up even further and we lost sight of the moon and stars, but we’d come to see Kakum, and see it we would.

Or that’s what I’d assumed would happen. In reality our trek through Kakum National Park was a complete waste of time, and although it’s arguable that my morning head would have made a walk through the Garden of Eden a miserable experience, I was pretty damn disappointed by the two-hour trudge through the rainforest. It wasn’t helped by the fact that the guide’s torch gave up the ghost after an hour and he had to borrow Susie’s much smaller torch, but the real problem was the lack of animals and the profusion of less pleasant forest life. Here’s what we saw in our two hours:

- A Mouse. Our first taste of the wildlife of Kakum was a tiny three-inch mouse that sat on a branch over the path. The guide shone his torch on it just before it scampered off, and Lukas noted, ‘Well, if we don’t see anything else, at least we’ve seen something.’ He didn’t mean to be prophetic; this was only ten minutes into the trek, and our hopes were still high.

- A Blur. This we got to see quite early on. Our guide stopped in his tracks, shone his torch into the bush where some leaves were rattling, and said, ‘Can you see the bush baby?’ None of us could; by the time we looked there was nothing but the blur of moving branches, but it got our hopes up. Unfortunately, this was the last animal activity we would see for two hours...

- Ants. The way you search for wildlife in the dark – or the way our guide did it, anyway – is to walk for a bit, stop, and cast your torch around you, searching the trees for the reflective eyes of bush babies and monkeys. About half an hour into our walk we stopped for the umpteenth time, and ten seconds later we all started slapping our legs in unison. It took a while for our addled brains to register what was going on, but it went something like this:

‘Damn mosquitoes are biting through my socks. Ouch!’

‘Shit, there are millions of them. Ow!’

‘Bloody hell, they’re running up my leg. Bugger, that hurts!’

‘Shit, they’re in my pants. How the hell...’

‘Oh my god! They’re ants!’

It would have been amusing if these ants hadn’t been so vicious.

We’d obviously stepped into a whole jamboree of evil biting ants, and it felt as if someone was stabbing hypodermic needles into my feet, legs and, worryingly, my groin. We jumped around like an accident in a drawing-pin factory, no longer caring about being quiet, and instead slapping away at the armies in our clothes. We staggered along the path and away from the nest, but it took ages to kill off the attackers, and even then individual ants found refuge in the folds of my trousers, poised to give me painful bites every few minutes for the next half-an-hour or so. Poor Ama was nearly in tears; she had an ant phobia, and suddenly exploring the rainforest in the dark didn’t feel like such a fun adventure.

- Moths. There was one more flurry of activity on the walk, when we walked into a bunch of moths, resting on the bushes by the path. Attracted by our torches they fluttered into us, banging off our foreheads and generally scaring the shit out of us, but luckily moths don’t bite. They were big buggers, though, with four-inch wingspans and sullen, brown fur coats, and I was less than delighted by the thought of head-butting moths the size of small birds in a pitch-black rainforest. Still, it was activity, so I shouldn’t complain.

On our way through the rest of the forest we got attacked by ants again, and from that moment things started to really scrape the bottom of the barrel (though, luckily, we avoided a third bout of bites when the guide spotted a huge two-inch-thick line of ants marching across the path; we’d obviously trodden on similar lines before, and it was easy to see how a simple footfall could produce a hundred or so irate ants swarming up your legs). There were no animals to be seen, we all itched like crazy and we were tired, so it was a definite pleasure to get to six o’clock, when our guide plonked himself down on a bench and said, ‘That was terrible. No animals.’ This was pretty much the only thing he’d said on the entire trek – apart from ‘Look, a mouse,’ ‘Can you see the bush baby?’ ‘They’re ants,’ and ‘Ah, moths’ – and although I couldn’t fault his accuracy, it would have helped if at least one of our party had been enthusiastic about the walk, especially the one who was being paid. But never mind; we’d reached the canopy walkway, and things were about to get a whole lot better.

In the Canopy

Kakum’s canopy walkway is famous throughout Ghana, and for good reason. Constructed with overseas help in 1995, this 350m-long string of seven suspended rope-ways through the rainforest canopy is unique in Africa, and is a great way to see the rainforest from above. I’ve walked through a lot of rainforests in my time, from temperate to tropical, but I’ve never walked through the canopy, and it’s a wonderful way to view the greenery. It’s also a good way to appreciate just how high the tallest trees are; the walkway is around 30 to 40m high and the trees still tower above you, and although it seems pretty safe as you bounce along high above the ground (which you can’t see for rainforest canopy), it’s definitely no place for those with vertigo or suicidal tendencies.

As we’d hoped, the sun rose while we were on the walkway, appearing gradually some distance above the horizon, peeping through the haze that envelops southern Ghana at this time of year (the haze is drummed up by the harmattan, a strong seasonal wind that blows down from the north, bringing with it copious amounts of dust from the Sahara). There was some frenetic activity in the trees some distance ahead of us, but by the time we got there, we found another group of visitors who’d managed to scare whatever it was away; it had been a troupe of monkeys swinging through the trees, according to the other group, who by a strange twist of fate turned out to be the inhabitants of the big red truck that had visited Big Milly’s before Christmas. Ghana is a small place; or, more accurately, Ghana has a small number of well-visited tourist traps, and the canopy walk at Kakum is one of them.

But it’s easy to see why. Perhaps it was just a reaction to the two hours of ant-ridden hell, but I loved the canopy walk. It must be a totally different experience in the middle of the day, when it’s crammed with the 250 to 300 visitors it attracts on an average day, but at 6am it’s a delightful place, and being that high up in a rainforest canopy is a real treat.

But by 7am it was all over, and Kakum’s unwritten policy of getting ’em in quick and getting ’em out again kicked in. Because the park is very much focussed on herding people round the walkway quickly, they charge you on a per hour basis for both the canopy and the walks, and this fee system doesn’t encourage relaxed exploration of the forest. With this in mind we set off on the return journey to Big Milly’s for rest, recuperation, and – after a very long sleep – New Year’s Eve on the beach.

Down the Den

Written: 31 December 2002

While wandering around town on the afternoon before New Year’s Eve, Lukas and I decided to stop off at Kojo’s place for a Coke and a laze in the shade. What I hadn’t realised was that Kojo’s shop doesn’t just sell the usual range of corner-shop goodies, like soap powder and cold Cokes; in fact the biggest bit of Kojo’s business comes from selling marijuana to the extended Rastafarian family around Kokrobite, and judging by the number of people we saw floating through his place on New Year’s Eve, stocking up with herbal essence makes for good business.

Tucked away behind a useful camouflage of palm trees some distance from the main road, we reached Kojo’s place only to find that it was deserted apart from the loud music blaring out from the obligatory hi-fi. At first it appeared that Kojo might not be in, until someone appeared and signalled that Kojo was ‘in the bushes’, pointing to a path beside the house; and sure enough, down the end of the path was a shady hollow, and there was Kojo, sitting on a bench, beavering away. It appeared we’d arrived just as he was preparing a new batch of grass for sale, ready for the rush of festive clients.

Kojo’s bush den is nothing more than a path that crosses a river bed, creating a natural hollow that’s utterly invisible from outside. This is a good thing, as plonked in front of Kojo as he sat straddling one end of a wooden bench were two large pieces of brown paper, each home to a huge cone-shaped pile of grass some 25cm across at the base. My jaw dropped; I’d never seen so much marijuana in one place before, but Kojo sat there as if it was the most natural thing in the world to be happily preparing the new batch for sale, which of course, for him, it was.

We ordered a Coke and sat down, happy to watch proceedings; we weren’t going anywhere, and Kojo’s hollow was nice and shady, but equally fascinating was Kojo’s preparation routine. The piles of grass were pretty roughly chopped up, not finely enough to be sold, so Kojo would grab a fistful of the pungent herb, roll it into a tight sausage shape, and holding it in his left hand he’d snip the exposed end with scissors, chopping the sausage into finely cut grass. He’d repeat this four or five times until he had a pile of decent saleable herb, and then the packing would begin.

Grass in Kokrobite is sold in little packets, each designed to be enough for one joint (well, a Rasta-standard pure grass joint anyway; the non-Rastas whom I talked to said that a normal wrap is easily enough for two European-strength joints). Kojo sat there packing the grass into 1000 cedi packs (about 7.5p), taking a very generous pinch of grass and placing it on a cigarette paper on top of a square of brown paper; he’d then start as if to roll a joint, but would pinch the ends, fold them together and twist them, creating a one-joint pack that comes in its own cigarette paper for instant rolling satisfaction. For people who roll pure grass joints, it’s a perfectly simple and very cheap way to buy your weed, which could explain why so many people in Kokrobite do it.

Come and Go

As we sat there watching Kojo chopping up his wares, pausing only to pull out the seeds, which he popped into his mouth and chomped with a loud crunching sound, life in the den started to take off. Despite being nothing more than a path through a river bed, Kojo’s place is a busy little crossroads, and as the afternoon drifted along, the number of people who popped in to buy packets of grass or smoke a joint was staggering. At one point Lukas caught my eye and commented on how busy it was; I looked around and there must have been ten people sitting round, rolling, smoking or just shooting the breeze.

It was fascinating. As I sat there in the background, pulling on my Coke and settling in, conversation flowed around me, flitting between Ghanaian English and the local language to such an extent that I often couldn’t tell which language was being used; the Ghanaian accent can be ferociously hard to understand and the local languages often incorporate a lot of English words (particularly the numbers), so you can find yourself gently bubbling along with someone else’s conversation, only picking up the odd word, before it dawns on you that someone’s just asked you a question in English.

‘Pardon?’ I said to the man with the white beard who’d arrived a few minutes earlier, and who’d bought one of Kojo’s 1000 cedi packets, rolled it up straight away and lit it in a cloud of acrid smoke.

‘Where are you from?’ he repeated.

‘England,’ I said. ‘London.’

‘Ah England, that is good,’ he said. ‘You are most welcome to Ghana.’

‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘It is a lovely place.’

‘Yah, it is good that you come to see Africa,’ he said. ‘We have many English visitors here, and lots from Europe, and it is good that you come to see how we live in Africa.’

‘It is not like the Arabs,’ piped up one of the others in the den, a young Rasta who was, against all the odds, managing to balance himself on the balls of his feet despite the effects of the huge joint he’d just put out.

‘The Arabs?’ I said.

‘Yeah, the Arabs,’ he continued. ‘When you crash your car, the Arabs they cry for the car, not for you. It is not good.’

‘It is true,’ said the older man. ‘Arabs they come here and they stay in the Novotel and get into air-conditioned cars, and they never come round to places like this. They never see how we really live. People who visit Africa to see how we really live are very welcome; it is great to see you here.’

‘And it’s great to be here,’ I said, meaning it. Kojo’s den might have been one of the dodgier parts of town, but there’s no doubt that everyone who floated into the river bed was peaceful, friendly and ridiculously chilled out. Of course, a lot of that was down to the quality of Kojo’s wares, but as a place to hang out, chatting to the locals as 2002 packed up its bags and headed for the door, it was hard to beat.

It also helped explain the ponderous nature of the inhabitants of Kokrobite; ‘just in from the mountains’, Kojo’s latest stash would be gone before too long, and the chopping and packaging process would have to start all over again. Business is good, when you’re the grass man in a Rastafarian village by the sea...

Drink in a Bag

Written: 1 January 2003

One of the things you get used to pretty quickly in West Africa is the art of drinking from a bag. In the West our drinks are always sold in bottles, boxes or cans, but in West Africa commercial soft drinks are sold in thick glass bottles which are sent back to the producer for re-use, and cans are a real rarity, often imported from South Africa and sold at a premium. However most non-corporate drinks are sold in bags, and sooner or later you just have to try one.

In Mali, bisap was the bag-based drink I bought the most. A sweet, red hibiscus tea sold in frozen bags by children everywhere, bisap was how I learned how to drink from a bag. The bags are made of thin stretchy plastic that miraculously manages to survive the battering it gets from being touted round the bus stops and backstreets of the desert, and once you’ve got the knack, it’s wonderfully easy to drink. The first time you try it, things are guaranteed to go wrong, but practice makes perfect and bisap is a cheap way to learn.

The most popular way to drink from a bag is to nip a hole in one corner; drinking bags are shaped like standard freezer bags, so when they’re filled to the brim with liquid and tied up at the top, you end up with two corners to choose from. Biting a small hole allows you to squeeze the drink out into your mouth, but the secret isn’t just to suck or to squeeze, it’s to suck and squeeze; if you just squeeze then the chances are your drink will spill down the bag and all over your shirt, and if you just suck then the bag collapses and you can’t suck any more. A judicious balance of the two is the secret, and the locals are so experienced they even manage to move onto the next level, squeezing the drink out of the bag in an arc that lands right in the mouth. I tried this once, and I still feel guilty about getting the bisap vendor bang in the eye.

It’s also important not to make your hole too big. If you do, the bisap rushes out before you can drink it, and you’ll get nothing more than a cold, red beard for your pains. Still, even the locals spill their bisap occasionally, and it’s better to have sucked and lost than never to have sucked at all. Indeed, if you want to graduate to drinking hot coffee from a bag, then it’s a good idea to practice on something cold first; making a mistake with a scalding beverage is not recommended.

Bagged Water

In Ghana the bag drink takes on a whole new significance, as even the water is sold in bags. In Senegal and Mali bagged water is very much available, but most of the time it’s sold in unmarked bags that could contain anything from river water to tap water, a real risk for the uninitiated traveller’s stomach. This means you’re stuck with buying bottles of mineral water (or, in some bigger cities, cheaper bags of mineral water) which pushes up the daily cost a lot; a bottle of water in the desert will set you back around CFA1000, or just under £1, which is fair enough when you consider it’s mineral water and this is the desert, but given the amount of water you have to drink in the heat, it’s a significant cost. In Ghana, though, it’s a different story.

Sure, you can still buy bottles of mineral water (though at half the price of Mali) and unmarked bags of chilled but dodgy water (known as ‘iced water’), but absolutely everywhere on every street you will find either someone with an ice box, or a child with a basket on their head, stuffed with chilled bags of purified water. ‘Ice water, pure water,’ the kids cry (though it sounds more like ‘Aieece-wata-peeya-wata!’) and for the princely sum of 200 cedi (a shade under 2p) you too can be the proud owner of a 500ml bag of pure, bacteria-free water. It’s not mineral water – it’s just normal water that’s been filtered and treated with ultraviolet light or ozone – but it’s cheap, it’s safe, and it’s wonderfully refreshing necking a bag of cold water in the tropical heat.

The bags themselves are interesting too. Printed with the brand name, the chemical composition of the water and some marketing blurb about how wonderful it is to drink purified water, these square sachets of see-through plastic are full to the brim with water, making the bags feel like chilled silicone breast implants. Indeed, there’s something decidedly symbolic about the whole thing; everywhere you look there are Ghanaians suckling on corners of these little bags, and once you’ve tried it, you can see that there’s something deep-seated in the comfort that it brings. I’m no psychologist, but I’m sure Freud would have had something to say about the bag drinkers of West Africa.

Indeed, I have a theory. One of the things that hit me about crossing the border into Ghana is how few people smoke here; not only is smoking not that common, but it’s frowned upon, especially among women. I asked Mr Prempeh why this was, and he said that when the economy took a bashing in the early 1980s people stopped buying cigarettes because they were too expensive, but that doesn’t explain how they managed to keep smoking in the much poorer Sahel countries like Mali and Burkina, where it’s practically compulsory. Sure, the influence of French culture is one reason for the popularity of smoking in Mali – they smoke a lot in France, after all – but it seems that in Ghana, something else has replaced the urge to smoke.

My theory is that bagged water is Ghana’s addiction. In the Sahel cigarettes are everywhere, and whenever the bus stops you see plenty of people with cigarette packets stacked on their heads; in Ghana, bags of water appear on every street corner, and my theory is that because bags of water are so cheap, and because everyone uses them all the time for cooking and drinking, they’ve replaced cigarettes as a way of getting comfort. And that’s where Freud comes in; there’s something curiously relaxing about suckling on bagged water, and where in Mali you’d see people dragging on a Dunhill, in Ghana you’re more likely to see people necking purified water.

It’s a nice theory, but I doubt it holds much aieece-wata-peeya-wata...

Along the South Coast

Cape Coast

Written: 4 January 2003

Unlikely as it might have seemed a few days ago, yesterday I finally got myself motivated to leave Kokrobite and head west to explore Ghana’s historic coastline. I tempered the strain of my departure by promising myself that I’d pop back for a night before returning to Accra, but if I hadn’t made a break for it quickly, I’d have been in danger of sinking deep into holiday-induced lethargy, which probably would have eaten up all my remaining time in West Africa. Kokrobite was the perfect stop for the festive season, but you can have too much of a good thing.

Having already done the journey to Cape Coast once (on the way to Kakum) it was a breeze doing it all over again, and by mid-afternoon I found myself booked into a cheap hotel in town with time to kill. Cape Coast’s attractions are the kind that deserve unhurried attention, so I decided to devote the whole of today to being a tourist, and simply spent yesterday afternoon wandering around, getting a feel for the place.

The thing that struck me most about Cape Coast was just how incredibly hassle-free and friendly the place is. Bear in mind that apart from some hurriedly curtailed activity in Kumasi and a day in Accra, I’ve not been anywhere terribly Ghanaian; Kokrobite village might have been in Ghana, but I don’t think the Rastas’ view on life is typical of the whole country, so in a sense Cape Coast was my first experience of exploring a typical Ghanaian town. Because of this I was stunned by the complete lack of intrusion as I wandered round town; in the Sahel I would have been mobbed by kids asking for cadeaux or touts trying to flog me tours of the local area, but during an entire afternoon wandering round Cape Coast I was accosted only twice, and both times the hassle was polite, benign and, after my training in Mali, amazingly easy to brush off. And not only was there practically no hassle or staring, but people were actively pleasant, smiling at me and asking ‘How are you?’ all the time. It was such a massive transition from the Sahel that I didn’t quite know how to react, so instead I just smiled back, which seemed to work.

Indeed, the only negative thing I can think of was the astounding humidity, which made moving round town an exercise in swimming rather than walking. It’s no exaggeration to say that I wandered into the restaurant for my evening meal looking like someone had dumped a bucket of water on my head, and even having a shower made precious little difference; down on the tropical Ghanaian coast getting dry is an impossibility, but it’s a small price to pay for such friendly people. Your clothes might dry instantly in Mali, but I know where I’d rather be.

Cape Coast Castle

Cape Coast’s main attraction is the stunning Cape Coast Castle, a World Heritage site that genuinely deserves the accolade. In nearly three months in West Africa I haven’t seen anything that remotely compares to Cape Coast Castle; it’s the first place I’ve visited here that compares to the colonial remnants in places like Malaysia and India, and I lapped it up.

I’ve always been a sucker for historical remains from colonial days, and Cape Coast initially reminded me of the Portuguese fortress on the island of Diu, off the west coast of India. Both castles preside over the pounding waves, both have rows of cannons lined up and aiming at an imaginary enemy, and both have the same faded air of colonialism and the futility of global empire building. But that’s where the similarity ends, for while Diu was a distant and lonely outpost of a colonial power that had long since lost its influence and where nothing much happened apart from the odd invasion from the locals, Cape Coast Castle was the nerve centre of British colonial rule in the Gold Coast (the colonial name for Ghana) and, more importantly, it was one of the biggest trading posts in that most abhorrent of all cargoes, slaves.

Yesterday I skirted the outside of the fort, but from the outside Cape Coast Castle is pretty unprepossessing; it sits on the coast like a squat, friendless building that slowly peels its white paint into the streets below, and it doesn’t look as impressive as you might expect a World Heritage coastal fort to look. It doesn’t sit on top of a cliff surveying its domain, it doesn’t have fairy-tale turrets and big towers looming over the town, and it doesn’t have anything exciting like a moat, but once you walk through the front door and pay your entrance fee the atmosphere starts to build. It’s subtle at first, but after a while you realise that this place has seen some serious history, and a lot of it is highly disturbing.

A Short History of Cape Coast Castle

The first thing I visited in Cape Coast Castle was the excellent museum housed in one of the castle wings. As I’ve already mentioned, Cape Coast Castle is a UNESCO World Heritage site, as are the two forts in neighbouring Elmina, and a lot of effort has been invested in justifying this accolade. The museum is just one of the results; the excellent guided tours are another, and ongoing restoration work (complete with its own museum) is a sign that its World Heritage status is being taken seriously. I spent hours in the museum – indeed, I had to be wrenched away to attend my guided tour, after which I returned to finish lapping up every detail about the castle – and without a doubt it’s the best museum I’ve yet seen in West Africa. OK, this isn’t necessarily saying much, but I found out a lot about the history of Cape Coast Castle, and it fascinated me.

The origins of the castle are obscure. The name Cape Coast comes from the Portuguese cabo corso (‘short cape’), and it’s known that from the 1480s the Portuguese came here to trade with the Fetu tribe, who at that time lived along the coast between Cape Coast and Elmina. In 1482 the Portuguese built a fortified trading post at Elmina – the first European building in sub-Saharan Africa – but it wasn’t long before other European nations had sniffed the scent of big profits, and during the 1600s and 1700s a varied collection of forts and trading posts appeared. In total, 60 forts lie along Ghana’s 300-mile stretch of coast, although the vast majority have crumbled into nothing and quite a few of those remaining are off-limits to the public; for example, Ussher Fort and James Fort in Accra are now prisons, and Osu Fort, also in Accra, is the seat of the Ghanaian government and you’re not even allowed to take pictures of it.

Given this level of activity, it was only a matter of time before the colonial powers started attacking each other’s castles. Forts changed hands seemingly every few years, and Cape Coast was no exception; in 1637 the Dutch attacked and captured nearby Elmina, which up to that point was the centre of Portuguese activity in West Africa. This ended Portuguese influence in the area, so by default the Dutch controlled Cape Coast. In 1650 the King of the Fetu granted permission to an English sea-captain to build on the cape, and in the same year he also granted the same permission to Henry Caerlof, a Swiss man who had previously worked for the Dutch and who sailed under the Swedish flag. By 1655 a house had been built on the cape, and over the coming years it was enlarged using slave labour into Carolusburg Fort, named after the then Swedish king. This fort was captured and enlarged by the Danish in 1657, and after a few more shuffles of power the English got their hands on it 1664, just in time for the Anglo-Dutch war of 1664-1668.

My favourite story of the Anglo-Dutch war concerns Fort Kormantin in Abanze, 32km east of Cape Coast (incidentally, this is the fort where Louis Armstrong claimed his ancestors had been sent from when enslaved). Fort Kormantin was built by the Dutch in 1598, but the English captured it and rebuilt it in 1645, naming it Fort York and thereby creating the first English settlement along this coastline. In 1664, over in the Americas, the English captured New Amsterdam and renamed it New York, so as a metaphorical V-sign to the English, the Dutch captured Fort York in 1665 and renamed it Fort Amsterdam.

Cape Coast, however, remained an English fort throughout the war, became the centre of English administration of the Gold Coast until the capital moved to Accra in 1877, and only changed hands again at Ghana’s independence in 1957. Cape Coast was most definitely the daddy of all Ghana’s forts.

The Slave Trade

So far all I’ve talked about is the history of the colonial powers fighting over tracts of land in faraway West Africa, but the thing that makes Cape Coast such a harrowing place is its role in the slave trade. So much has been written about the slave trade that I doubt I can throw any new light on this shameful episode in human history, but a potted history wouldn’t go amiss.

The slave trade was operating well before Europeans started building slave forts along the West African coast. Indeed, slaves had been bought and sold along the trans-Saharan trade route since pre-Roman times, and with the expansion of Islam in the eighth century, things really started taking off; each year from around 800 AD to the 1600s, between 5000 and 10,000 slaves were exported from the African continent, mainly via North Africa, the Red Sea, and the East African coast.

The smell of gold brought the Europeans into contact with West Africa, and between the 1480s and the 1590s the Portuguese made huge amounts of money from trading gold. However this wasn’t enough, so to increase their profits they moved into the already-thriving slave trade, and between 1485 and 1540 some 12,000 slaves were imported by the Portuguese and sold to gold merchants from places as far away as Mali. Thus the Europeans got their first taste of the profits that could be made from the sale of humans, a taste that wouldn’t turn sour until the 19th century.

With increased European presence in West Africa, the slave trade started to escalate. It wasn’t long before a triangular trade system was in place, with ships leaving Europe for West Africa stocked up with textiles, metal, guns, rum, tobacco, ceramics and beads. In West Africa these goods would be traded for gold, ivory, pepper and slaves before heading for the New World, where the slaves would be sold to work on the plantations, in exchange for sugar, cotton and tobacco. Each ship might have taken between 18 months and three years to complete the journey, but the profits to be made at each stage were well worth the investment in ship and crew, and the European powers started building their empires on slave labour.

African slaves were captured in a number of different ways, but the most common was for the Europeans to encourage inter-tribal wars. These would produce prisoners of war on each side, who could then be sold to the Europeans in exchange for goods like guns; these arms could then be used to capture even more neighbouring tribesmen. Another way of turning a profit was for tribes to sell their criminals to the Europeans, an eerie precursor of the English policy of shipping convicts out to America and Australia, but however the slaves got captured they would end up somewhere like Cape Coast, ready to be shipped to the Americas.

Cape Coast Castle has slave dungeons that make the cubbyholes on Île de Gorée look like the storage cupboards they probably are. Around 1000 male slaves and 500 female slaves would be stored in the castle at any one time, and most of them would be locked up in the dungeon for six to 12 weeks, waiting for the slave ships to dock. They would be allowed out for fresh air two or three times a week, but apart from that they were imprisoned in dark, dank dungeons that would have been utterly disgusting. The dungeons today are empty, echoing chambers that barely hint at what they would have been like with hundreds of slaves crammed in there, but with only a handful of barred windows to let in the breeze and a rough channel down the middle of the cells to carry away urine and faeces, it would have been repugnant.

Conditions on the slave traders’ ships were even worse, as depicted in that famous plan drawing showing slaves crammed into every nook and cranny of a ship, genuinely as close as sardines in a can. It’s futile to even attempt to imagine what it was like to be wrenched from your home and family, dragged to Cape Coast Castle and left to rot for two or three months in the dungeon, before being jammed into a slave ship where between a quarter and a half of the slaves would die before reaching the Americas. Even assuming you survived the trip, you then had to contend with living the life of a slave, forever exiled from your home.

Estimates of the number of slaves transported from Africa vary from 12 million to 25 million – one estimate says that in 1700, at the height of the slave trade, more than 650,000 slaves were exported in that year alone – but whatever the numbers, they’re huge, and most of these slaves came from West Africa and the Congo-Angola region. The trade started in the 1500s and over the next 300 years they were shipped out in what has become known as the African Diaspora, with one-third ending up in Brazil, one-third in the Caribbean islands and the rest throughout the Americas. The slave trade did not completely end until the 1870s, though Britain abolished its slave trade in 1807, signalling an end to Cape Coast’s role in transporting slaves.

The numbers are interesting but hard to imagine; they’re just too big. Indeed, the most effective display I saw in the Cape Coast museum was an innocent little poster that proclaimed a forthcoming sale of slaves; it was so weird, I copied it down:

To Be Sold & Let

By Public Auction,

On Monday the 18th of May, 1829,

Under the Trees.

For Sale,

The Three Following

SLAVES,

Viz.

Hannibal, about 30 Years old, an excellent

House Servant, of good Character.

William, about 35 Years old, a Labourer.

Nancy, an excellent House Servant and Nurse.

The Men belonging to “Leech’s” Estate,

and the Woman to Mrs D Smit.

Also for Sale, at Eleven o’Clock,

Fine Rice, Gram, Paddy, Books, Muslins,

Needles, Pins, Ribbons &c. &c.

The bit that really hits me is the section at the end; I think it sums up the inhumanity of the slave trade rather well, but not by talking about numbers, or being crammed into dungeons in remote castles, or the nightmare of being shoehorned into a ship so tightly that you can’t sit up, with the faeces and vomit of the people above dripping down on you as you lie there in the dark. The notice above, to me, denotes the real human tragedy of the slave trade; back then it was socially acceptable and indeed normal to think of your fellow man not as a human being, but as an object to be sold at the same time as rice, books, muslins and needles. Thankfully most of the world has moved on and human rights are now centre stage; one sincerely hopes the human race will never print posters like this again.

Touring the Castle

There’s no doubt that the highlights of Cape Coast Castle are the museum and the dungeons, but there are plenty of other historical touches that bring the place to life. One of the more life-affirming is the fact that when the British abolished slavery they walled up the entrance of the tunnel that leads from the male dungeon to the beach where the slave ships would drop anchor; not only this, the Fante tribe have turned this walled section into a shrine to their local gods, because there used to be a shrine on the site of Cape Coast Castle before the Europeans stuck their oars in, and it’s now back in operation, smothered in animal skins, wine, schnapps, bowls, cloths and various other bits and bobs. Meanwhile the tunnel to the beach was converted by the British into a cistern for fresh water, a huge improvement on the previous use; it’s good to see a guilty conscience being put to good use...

The castle itself is a delight too, and it’s in good condition, despite the peeling white paint that makes it look like an obruni wilting in the tropical humidity. The fort went to seed a bit under British rule, especially after the capital was moved to Accra, and by 1960 it was home only to the town’s main post office, the law courts, the port’s customs house, and a prison in one wing of the fort. In the 1960s the post office and law courts moved out of the castle grounds and into the town; then, in 1962, Cape Coast port was closed to international shipping, and the customs house was closed and became derelict (it was demolished in 1996). Finally, in 1993 the prison was closed, well after the public had started to visit the fort; this was no doubt because the tour through the governor’s quarters accidentally enabled nosy foreigners to see first-hand what it’s like in a Ghanaian prison.

The big change came in 1979 when the fort was listed as a World Heritage site, and in 1989 the present renovation was started, with big strides being made throughout 1991. Looking at the photos, the paint has faded and peeled since that renovation, but the results are still spectacular. Cape Coast reeks of atmosphere, with its battlements stocked with rows of black cannons; the piles of cannon balls ready to be hurled 3km at enemy ships; the nasty little cell in the corner of the courtyard where slaves who tried to escape or revolt were locked up until they simply died of starvation; and the comparatively luxurious quarters for the British governors with their lovely views along the coast.

I spent hours soaking up the atmosphere in my atmospherically soaking clothes, and that was before I’d even thought about the other forts Cape Coast has to offer.

Fort William and Fort Victoria

I figured I might as well visit the two other forts in Cape Coast, even though they’re completely eclipsed by Cape Coast Castle. They’re nothing special but I like walking, and as these two forts are both perched on the tops of hills, I gave in to the male compulsion to conquer every peak, no matter how small. In Cape Coast Castle there are two turrets on opposite ends of the battlements that look out directly at the two other forts; this is because the two smaller forts functioned as look-out posts that could signal the main castle in case of invasion from the sea. These glimpses were just enough to whet my appetite, so off I went.

Fort William was built in 1820 and was converted into a lighthouse when Cape Coast was a busy port; unfortunately it no longer functions as a lighthouse due to the rather glaring lack of a light, but it’s now a home for people who work in the castle and a friendly local let me in to climb to the top for some wonderful views of the town. The atmosphere was somewhat tempered by the faded colours of the washing that they’d draped over the cannons, but at a stretch I could imagine a lonely scout on duty up here, sighting an invasion force out in the Gulf of Guinea and hurriedly lighting his lamp to signal the castle.

Fort Victoria was even more lonely and consisted of nothing more than a round wall with a small square turret in the middle. Being stuck out here on guard duty would be seriously boring, but at least the view was pleasant, and there was even a small breeze to remind me just how utterly sweaty I’d become. And with that thought, I returned to my hotel, happy to have experienced the power of historical Cape Coast.

Elmina

Written: 5 January 2003

A short distance west of Cape Coast is yet another perfect example of Ghana’s coastal fortifications; Elmina boasts not one but two World Heritage forts, and after the moving experience of visiting Cape Coast Castle I didn’t waste any time in hopping in a shared taxi for a day trip to Elmina.

Elmina is a lovely little town, curved around the back of a large south-facing crescent bay that gradually rises into a series of small hills behind the town. At the western end of the bay the tides have formed a long, thin lagoon that initially runs parallel to the shoreline, forming the town’s fishing harbour before emptying north into what is now a collection of salt-making plants called Benya Lagoon; meanwhile, the fishing harbour forms a rocky peninsula to the south that’s a perfect spot for St George’s Castle, the main attraction in Elmina.

As if this wasn’t enough, on top of a hill on the northern side of the fishing harbour, bang in the middle of town, sits Fort St Jago, its white walls and red tiled roofs more reminiscent of a Mediterranean villa than a colonial castle. The composition of Elmina is perfect, with the two castles eyeing each other up across town while the fishing port bustles along underneath. It really is picture postcard stuff.

St George’s Castle

By far the bigger of the two fortifications, St George’s Castle is also the older, and the one that’s most geared up for tourism. As at Cape Coast the castle contains an informative museum, though interestingly the museum at St George’s hardly mentions slavery at all, and doesn’t go into great detail about the castle itself, instead concentrating on the local people and their way of life. If you only visited Elmina and didn’t have time to explore Cape Coast too, you could be forgiven for thinking that St George’s Castle was hardly involved in the slave trade at all. You would, however, be wrong; as with Cape Coast, the history of St George’s makes pretty ugly reading.

The story starts back in 1482, when the Portuguese explorer Captain Diego d’Azambuja sought permission from King Kwamena Ansah of the local Edina tribe to build a fort in his territory. The resulting fort was called São Jorge da Mina (St George of the Mine), and the first buildings were started on 20 January, 1482, making what is now known as St George’s Castle the oldest major stone structure to be erected by Europeans in the tropics; at the same time the Portuguese corrupted the name Edina to el mina, or ‘the mine’, referring to the many gold mines in the area (the local name for the town is still Edina, but its official name remains Elmina).

During the first year of construction São Jorge was visited by Christopher Columbus, ten years before his famous voyage to the Americas, and the castle was developed further with funding from the King of Portugal. Soon São Jorge housed between 40 and 60 paid officials of the Royal Court and was home to a Christian primary school; the castle also performed conversions, though not always with great success, as this quote from the museum display so eloquently puts it:

In the 1570s, Augustinian monks embarked on [the] evangelization of Elmina. The Augustinian evangelization suddenly ended when the monks were killed.

Undeterred, the Portuguese built a Franciscan church on what is now St Jago’s Hill and dedicated it to St George, in the process building the first Christian church in Ghana and the first known Christian church in Africa outside Ethiopia. A walled town developed around the castle and by the early 1600s it was a self-governing city state, ruled by the Edina chief, his elders and the Portuguese governor of St George’s Castle.

By 1700 the population had grown to over 12,000, but well before then things started to hot up on the Ghanaian coast. Initially the Portuguese were the only Europeans in the area, trading from their centres at Elmina and Axim and making a handsome profit, but by the start of the 1600s the Dutch had set up a commercial centre at Mori, 20km east of Elmina. This was a pretty low key affair, but the Dutch were obviously interested in expanding, because in 1596 they launched their first attack on Elmina; they tried to capture the castle from the sea, but to no avail.

Shocked by the attack, the Portuguese decided their little chapel on St Jago’s Hill was no longer safe, so the following year they built a replacement inside the walls of St George’s Castle and left the old chapel to crumble. The Dutch attacked again in 1625, and again their naval assault was repelled, but the next time the Dutch tried to take Elmina they changed tack. Their third attack, starting on 22 August, 1637, consisted of a three-day bombardment of St George’s Castle from the partial ruins of the chapel, which the Dutch had surreptitiously occupied with help from the locals. Faced with a siege from the perfect vantage point of St Jago’s Hill, the Portuguese surrendered, leaving the Dutch to occupy the castle.

Unimpressed with the thought of worshipping in the Catholic church the Portuguese had built inside St George’s Castle, the Dutch converted the church into a large trading hall and built their own Protestant church within the castle walls. They also repaired the damage they’d inflicted during the castle’s capture, added more accommodation, paved the Great Court and improved the castle’s defences; the Dutch were to remain in possession of Elmina and St George’s Castle until 1872, when they sold it to the British to concentrate on their more lucrative interests in Indonesia.

But until that point Elmina itself was pretty lucrative, for like Cape Coast Castle along the coast, St George’s Castle was a trading post for slaves for the New World. As with Cape Coast Castle the whitewashed walls look positively radiant in the hazy tropical sun, and St George’s Castle is arguably even more picturesque than the behemoth of Cape Coast; it doesn’t have the broad, open vista of the ocean that Cape Coast does, but it has tall, shady courtyards, it has lovely ramparts studded with turreted towers, it has a moat (though it’s now dry), and the view over to picturesque Fort St Jago is enchanting. It’s hard to imagine that, like Cape Coast, St George’s Castle saw human degradation reach its lowest point.

The slave dungeons in St George’s Castle aren’t remotely as large as those under Cape Coast – where Cape Coast could hold 1000 men and 500 women, St George’s could only hold about 100 men and 100 women – but they’re still distressing. Instead of being below floor level, as the Cape Coast dungeons are, the women’s dungeon opens out into one of the castle’s tall courtyards. Around the top of one end of this courtyard is a balcony that formed part of the officers’ quarters, and according to the excellent guide I hired to take me round the castle, this is where the officers would stand and order the female slaves to be hauled out and paraded in the courtyard below. They’d study the slaves, and if they liked the look of any, they’d have them sent up the stairs, where they’d whisk them off and rape them, just in time for tea.

Slaves would be held in the dungeons for between one and three months, waiting for a slaver ship to turn up. When one arrived they’d be led down a dank corridor to the ‘Door of No Return’, a one-person-wide slot in the castle wall through which they would stumble, chained and manacled, blinking in the sunlight while looking for the last time on their homeland. Between a quarter and a half of them would die on board ship, a fate comparable with that reserved for any slaves who rebelled while in St George’s; those unfortunates would be locked up in a small, airless prison just off the Great Court, where they would be left to die of thirst and starvation. The idea was to inflict maximum pain on slaves who revolted, to act as a deterrent; whether it worked or not I have no idea, but the skull and crossbones over the door is, at the very least, unsubtle.

Fort St Jago

As you wander round St George’s Castle, one of the more delightful aspects is the way its twin, Fort St Jago, keeps flitting into view through the windows and turrets. Perched on top of a small hill across the fishing harbour from St George’s Castle, Fort St Jago is small and perfectly formed. In keeping with its pleasant aspect, it doesn’t share the dark secrets of its bigger brother, for while the Portuguese and the Dutch herded slaves through St George’s as quickly as they could, Fort St Jago simply sat there, looking down on the travesty below without comment.

When the Dutch captured St George’s Castle by bombarding it from St Jago Hill, they realised that they would have to retain possession of the hill if they weren’t to lose their new acquisition to the same trick. With this in mind, in 1666 they built Fort Coenraadsburg on the ruins of the Portuguese chapel, to act as a military barracks for protection of the town, which was booming with the burgeoning trade in locally mined gold and locally captured slaves.

The Dutch would occupy Elmina town and the two forts for 235 years, until the British, keen to control the whole Gold Coast so they could add it to their growing empire, attacked first in 1871, and then again in 1872. It’s surprising that this hadn’t happened before – on a clear day you can see Cape Coast Castle from Elmina, which must have been really irritating for the empire-mad Victorians – but it turned out that the Dutch weren’t remotely interested in defending this distant outpost, especially as the trade in slaves and gold had long since dried up. So, to avoid a long, hard struggle to a foregone conclusion, the Dutch wisely sold Elmina to the British for a small sum and sailed off to concentrate on their more profitable colonies in Indonesia.

Under the British St George’s Castle became a colonial police academy, and it remained an academy after Ghana’s independence until it was finally declared a national monument in 1972. However, after the departure of the Dutch, Fort St Jago passed through a number of strange incarnations over the years. It started its new life as a guesthouse and then morphed into a leprosy hospital (until a permanent hospital could be built in town) and then a prison (again, until a prison could be built elsewhere) before returning to life as a guesthouse. In 1986 the government closed the guesthouse and started promoting the fort as a piece of Ghana’s heritage, but surprisingly the guide on the fort door told me that plans are still afoot to convert it back into a guesthouse; it’s just money that’s the problem. Given that Fort St Jago is a World Heritage site it seems a little odd that it might end up being a guesthouse again, but for once I can see the logic. The fort would make a perfect place to stay.

For a start, the rooms are huge and airy, and given a reasonable amount of work they’d be wonderfully atmospheric. The old chapel would make a great suite and the officers’ rooms would be perfect for a dormitory, while the tower would be the ideal spot for a candlelight dinner as the sun sinks into the shoreline. Meanwhile the courtyard would be a great spot for sitting and reading, sheltered from the hot afternoon sun by the shadow of the entrance hall and lit at night by the lovely Victorian-era streetlight in the middle of the yard.

But it would be the stupendous views from the fort’s rooms that would be the real selling point. From the southern walls the view of St George’s Castle is beautiful and you can clearly see the grassy patch where the old town of Elmina used to be, before the British bombarded it in 1873, forcing the town to up sticks and move across to the other side of the lagoon; now it’s a pleasant grassy park next to the castle and behind the bustling fish market. You can see the lagoon in its entirety, stretching west through the fishing harbour before emptying into the flat, criss-crossed expanse of Benya Lagoon; during its journey it forms the basis for both the town’s main economies, fishing and salt-making. And all the while the palm-fringed Ghanaian coast stretches east and west, looking a lot cleaner and more beautiful from this distance than close up, when the flotsam and jetsam of modern African life is all too obvious.

The view north is less stunning, but it’s more interesting because you get to watch the town bubble along beneath you. A red Catholic church dominates Elmina from a hill to the north, while bang in the middle of town is a striking Methodist church; finally a Presbyterian church to the northeast is a vivid reminder that Ghana is home to a staggering number of different brands of Christianity.

Around Elmina

From the fort you can also spot one or two posubans, their concrete decorations cracking in the sun. Posubans are buildings that are peculiar to the Ghanaian coastal region, and peculiar is the right word; they might be utterly Ghanaian in concept, but disappointingly they look like they could be from anywhere in the world... anywhere with a bizarre taste for tacky decoration, that is.

Each posuban belongs to an Asafo company. The Asafo companies were originally Akan military groups who were devoted to the defence of the state (the Akan people make up about 44 per cent of Ghana’s population and are based around Kumasi, with the Ashanti tribe being the most influential members of the Akan). The name Asafo comes from the local words sa (war) and fo (people), but although Asafo companies are no longer particularly military, they do exert political influence through their involvement in the selection and enstoolment of new chiefs (Ashanti chiefs don’t sit on thrones, they sit on stools, hence they are ‘enstooled’). The Asafo companies’ civic duties include working on sanitation projects, road-building, policing, firefighting and community entertainment, so in a sense they’re like a Rotary Club with clout; and each company also has its own posuban, which acts as a religious shrine and a gathering place for meetings and rituals, not unlike a clubhouse.

This is all well and good, but it doesn’t explain why posubans are decorated with a thankfully unique type of concrete sculpture. In Elmina I saw posubans with concrete ships on their roofs, crumbling figures depicting Adam and Eve, and plenty of unintentional representations of concrete cancer in action. I suppose they looked quite fun, and each sculpture does have a story attached to it (which you can discover by talking to the Asafo members, if you are happy to pay for the privilege) but I get the feeling that the posubans in Elmina aren’t the best on the coast, and I couldn’t help feeling that they were just plain ugly.

So I explored Elmina by foot, wandering from the castle and the fort to the Dutch cemetery, which was originally built in 1806 on the shore of the bay before being moved to the current site at the foot of St Joseph’s Hill. It was atmospheric, but by this stage I’d started to notice an increased amount of hassle from the locals. In no way was it anything like the battering you get in the Sahel, but instead of the relatively happy vibe of Cape Coast, every chirpy ‘hello’ I heard in Elmina quickly lapsed into a demand for pens, money, school books, my address or something equally unfortunate.

One tout asked me my name as I entered St George’s Castle, and when I left the castle he’d written ‘To Mark From Tony’ on a seashell, which he wanted to give to me as a present. That was a pleasant surprise, except he then started hounding me for a present in return, preferably some money, and it soon became obvious that this was simply another way of selling me a shell with my name on it, which I really didn’t want. I ended up handing it back to him, much to his dismay, but it summed up Elmina’s hassle factor; compared to Mali it’s practically invisible, but compared to Cape Coast it’s as irritating as the posubans are tacky.

The upshot was that instead of spending the whole day exploring Elmina, I hopped into a shared taxi and headed back to Cape Coast, just in time to visit a spot for lunch (a spot being a Ghanaian drinking hole – it was the only place I could find that was serving food on a Sunday). A couple of minutes after sitting down I noticed that there was a distinct smell of petrol coming from the floor, and sure enough the ground was smeared with an oily sheen.

‘Is this petrol down here?’ I asked the guy in charge, straining to be heard over the thumping music that all spots are morally obliged to pump out.

‘No, it’s diesel,’ he said. ‘I put it down because it is very dusty here, and if dust lands on diesel it sticks. Clever, eh?’

Tactfully I didn’t answer, but even though the oil fumes made my fried chicken taste somewhat mechanical, I was happy to be back in the Cape. Elmina’s touts have a long way to go before they’re up to Malian standards, but it would be awful if, in ten years’ time, visitors just think of it as a pretty place that’s spoiled by the hassle. It could happen, but I hope not; Elmina is a really special place.

The Prempeh Room

Written: 5 January 2003

If I hadn’t been told of the existence of the Prempeh Room I would never have spotted it, but thanks to an off-the-cuff comment by Mr Prempeh back in Accra, I knew what to look for. And so I discovered that St George’s Castle has a link to the Prempeh family, which helped make a fascinating castle even more enthralling.

First, some background history. During the 17th century the influence and power of the Kumasi-based Ashanti tribe grew considerably, mainly due to their interests in the burgeoning trade in gold and slaves. Before long the Ashanti nation decided it wanted to cut out the middleman in its transactions with the Europeans, and through an alliance between the Ashanti, the Edina and the Dutch, Elmina was picked as the main port for Ashanti trading.

This wasn’t the end of Ashanti ambitions, and an attempt in 1807 by the Ashantis to invade Cape Coast didn’t quite work out as planned, as the Fante tribe in Cape Coast formed an alliance with the British against the Edina-Ashanti-Dutch trio. In 1873 the Ashantis got their revenge when they marched south and defeated the Fante, but in retaliation the British marched north, invading the Ashanti homeland and capturing Kumasi. This led to the 1874 Treaty of Fomena, which forced the Ashantis to pay a war indemnity in gold to the British and to give up all claims to Elmina.

In 1888 the British confirmed the installation of a new Asantehene, the king of the Ashantis. Kwaku Dua III, also known as Nana Akwasi Agyeman Prempeh I, was enstooled on 28 March at the age of 16. King Prempeh I was Mr Prempeh’s grandfather, and as I stood there in the museum at St George’s Castle, studying the large picture of Prempeh I on display, I could genuinely see the likeness. This was fun.

But why is there a picture of Mr Prempeh’s grandfather in St George’s Castle in the first place? The story goes that in 1894 the British were getting worried that the Ashantis might want to try to revive their erstwhile empire, and they were concerned that the Ashantis might do this by siding with the French or the Germans, who at that time controlled the countries surrounding the Gold Coast; the French were in the Ivory Coast to the west and Upper Volta to the north, and the Germans were in Togoland to the east. To help prevent this, the British asked the Asantehene – Mr Prempeh’s grandfather – to accept British protection, to install a British Resident in Kumasi and to receive official payment for himself and his chiefs. In April 1895 the Ashanti Union sent a delegation of over 300 people to Britain to discuss the issue, but while they were in transit Governor William Maxwell issued an ultimatum demanding that King Prempeh accept a British Resident immediately, and that he pay a war indemnity of 50,000oz in gold, dating back to 1873.

King Prempeh promised to pay part of the indemnity immediately and the rest in instalments, but this gesture was too late; on 20 January 1896 the British arrested him, along with his father, his mother, his brother, two close relatives, some paramount chiefs and some military captains, and had them exiled to St George’s Castle in Elmina. The room in which the king was held is now called the Prempeh Room, and it sits right on top of the southeastern corner of the castle, an unassuming white block that’s balanced by a similar room on the southwestern corner of the battlements.

Unfortunately, structural damage to the castle means that the Prempeh Room is currently closed to the public, but I could still see it across the courtyard, concrete evidence of the role of the Prempehs in Ghana’s colourful history. From here Mr Prempeh’s grandfather was first exiled to Freetown in Sierra Leone, and then to the Seychelles; it wasn’t until 1924 that he finally returned home to Kumasi.

It might pale into insignificance compared to the suffering of the crowds of slaves who passed through St George’s Castle on the way to the New World, but looking at the lonely Prempeh Room, you can imagine the awful realisation that must have hung heavy on the king’s shoulders. Exile is a terrible thing, whether you’re being exiled to the Seychelles or to the plantations of the Americas, and being exiled as a king must be a difficult cross to bear.

Thankfully, Mr Prempeh’s grandfather lived to return home, unlike the poor souls who were shipped out from the dungeons, three floors below. For them, an anonymous death was as good as it got; at least Prempeh I got his stool back.

Nzulezo

Written: 7 January 2003

After double-dosing on the slave forts of Cape Coast and Elmina, I decided my best strategy for exploring the Ghanaian coast was to head as far west as the attractions would take me, and then slowly make my way back east, back towards Accra. This would require a reasonably hard day’s travelling from Cape Coast to the village of Nzulezo, near the border with Côte d’Ivoire, but I figured it would be worth the effort; Nzulezo doesn’t appear on any of my maps and is conspicuously absent from my guidebook, but I’d heard that it was home to a village entirely built on stilts, and this sounded weird enough for me. After the fantastic but touristy World Heritage forts of the central coast, I fancied getting off the beaten track a bit.

It was therefore highly inconvenient that I should be sitting in the egg and bread stall round the corner from my Cape Coast hotel, all geared up to spend the day travelling into the nether regions, when my stomach suddenly started cramping up. I’d just taken my daily dose of Doxycycline and one of the side effects is a slightly squiffy stomach, but this built up into something altogether more unpleasant, and with the deft leap of the well-practised I jumped out of the stall and ran over to the mercifully clean open sewer, where I spent the next five minutes heaving up fluorescent green bile.

It’s an indication of my general level of health in Africa that I simply finished the job, blew my nose, washed my mouth out with purified water and sat right back down again to see if I could finish off the remains of my breakfast. Indeed, I was so determined to head west that I practically psyched myself better, and after necking a replacement Doxycycline and drinking a few bags of water, I hopped on the bus for the junction town of Takoradi.

It’s also an indication of how good Ghana’s transport can be that I only had to wait for an hour and a half for the Takoradi-Beyin minibus to fill up and trundle on its way. Beyin is a tiny village in the middle of nowhere, well off the main road, and in the Sahel I would have been waiting for hours, but for some reason there just seem to be more people wanting to travel in Ghana, and by mid-afternoon I found myself in Beyin, sweating my way along the dirt track that passes for Beyin’s main road. My short illness had passed as swiftly as it had appeared, and now my mission was to find the office of the Ghana Wildlife Service, who, I’d been told, would sort me out with transport to the stilt village.

Magical Mystery Tour

It took me a little time to find the office, not because I was heading in the wrong direction, but because the sign outside the building – the last building in town, of course – actually read ‘Amansuri Conservation and Integrated Development (ACID) Project’, with ‘Ghana Wildlife Service’ scribbled in tiny letters underneath. I had no idea what ACID was all about, but it seemed like a good excuse for a truly awful pun.

‘Hello,’ I said to the four smiling men in the office. ‘Am I in the right place to find out about Nzulezo?’

‘Yes, that’s right,’ they said.

‘So this is where I can sort out transport to the village?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ they replied. ‘We go by canoe.’

‘Is it anything to do with the ACID project?’ I asked.

‘Yes, that is correct,’ one of them said. ‘It’s part of the conservation project. We do a lot of things, like working with locals so they do not kill animals, conserving the marine turtle along the coast, setting up bird-watching tours for tourists, doing canoeing trips to the stilt village, organising trips to look at plants and animals, and so on.’

‘That’s a really worthy cause,’ I said. ‘And can I stay in the village too?’

‘Yes, there is a guesthouse,’ he said.

‘Sounds good,’ I said, trying not to grin. ‘Then I’d like to sign up for one ACID trip to the stilt village, please.’

‘OK,’ said the man, while I giggled to myself slightly pathetically; I guess that’s what long-term travelling does to your sense of humour...

The Canoe Trip

Unwittingly I hit the nail bang on the head; visiting Nzulezo was indeed a trippy experience. Once I handed over my money I was introduced to a young man called Evans, who was to be my guide. Strangely enough this turned out to be his real name, despite sounding ridiculously Victorian; the only Ghanaian name he had was Kojo, as he’d been born on a Monday, so Evans it was. I felt like I’d signed up for a flag-waving British expedition deep into the interior as Evans led me down the road and into a huge, flat field full of grass.

‘We walk this way to the boat,’ he said, and I looked around, confused. All I could see was a mass of knee-high grass stretching into the distance, with a dirt path leading straight into the heart of it.

‘Do we have to walk far?’ I asked, wondering where we were heading.

‘No, it is just here,’ he replied, and as he spoke we rounded a corner in the path and suddenly I understood; the grass was the lagoon, and the path dipped into dark water where ten shallow canoes sat, bumping in the breeze. Wading between the boats, the clay-like black mud oozing between my toes, we soon reached a canoe called The Amansuri and hopped in.

‘It is maybe one hour to the village by boat,’ said Evans, and although he overestimated considerably, it was quite a trip. Poling from the back like a Venetian gondolier, he pushed us along a cleared path through the grass like a kind of tropical icebreaker, and we drifted pleasantly through the light green meadow, stirring up the dark brown water as it reflected mottled images of white water lilies, steel blue sky and the dark greenish brown of the palm trees lining the lagoon.

‘These are raffia trees all around us,’ said Evans, following my gaze. He went on to explain that the villagers get palm wine from the raffia tree, which they then distil to make an utterly lethal drink called akpeteshie. (‘You can try it if you like,’ said Evans, ‘but we guides are not allowed to drink while we’re doing tours; if we drink we get suspension.’ I figured I’d better not tempt fate after my experience at breakfast.) Meanwhile the tree’s bushy fronds are used to make roofs and the thick, round branches make up the village’s stilts, the main structures of the houses, the walls and the walkways. Not only that, they also make fish traps out of raffia; it’s truly the building block of life out in Nzulezo.

‘The village people do three things,’ said Evans. ‘They distil akpeteshie, they farm the land about three or four kilometres from the village, and they fish in the lagoon. The fish come to spawn here in the grass, so there is no fishing here, but there is much fishing in the open lake.’

‘Is it deep here?’ I asked, looking at the jet black water as it lapped round our boat like a lake of flat Guinness.

‘No, it is not deep,’ he said, pushing his pole in to a depth of about two feet. ‘In the wet season the river is very high, and the grass is completely covered, but now the water level is going down and it’s only about halfway up the grass.’

Like most wetlands the Amansuri Lagoon is home to plenty of aquatic and bird life, though to an ornithological philistine like me the wildlife makes for little more than an impressive-sounding list of names. Evans pointed out a few cattle egrets, an African yellow pied wagtail, a European swift and the rusty-red great African jacana, much to my polite indifference. Unfortunately we didn’t see a great heron or the catchily named lily trotter, who apparently also inhabit the area, and neither did we see any monkeys in the short stretch of rainforest that we cut through.

‘We have black and white colubus monkeys here,’ said Evans, ‘and the moana monkey too.’ But my attention was elsewhere, for all of a sudden we broke free of the grassland and there was the lagoon, a huge flat expanse of water stretching out to distant, raffia-studded shores. Evans ditched his pole and started paddling, pointing to the left-hand bank of the lagoon. I followed his finger and saw a smudge in the distance.

‘The stilt village,’ said Evans. ‘That’s where we’re going.’

‘Excellent,’ I thought. ‘This should be interesting.’

The Stilt Village

The first thing that struck me about the stilt village was that the tall poles that stick vertically out of each house made the place look like a balding porcupine. The second thing that struck me, as we drifted closer, was that each of these poles had a surprisingly familiar object stuck on the end; that’s because these poles are in fact TV aerials.

‘Do they have electricity here?’ I asked Evans in a surprised voice.

‘Yes, but everything runs off car batteries,’ he replied. ‘The villagers have to take them to Eikwe to charge them up, or sometimes to Takoradi.’

I’d passed through both Takoradi and Eikwe on the way, and the thought of having to lug a bunch of car batteries all that way just to get electricity was something I wouldn’t relish, but obviously it doesn’t bother the locals too much, as the throbbing bass of about five hi-fis, all set to volume 11, greeted us as we paddled towards the village.

As we got closer and the music got louder it became apparent that the stilt village is exactly that; each house stands on a network of thick poles, driven into the lagoon’s bed, with about five feet between the water level and the houses’ floors. At first the houses look as if they are made from corrugated iron, but as we reached the village it became clear that practically everything – apart from the odd tin roof – is made from raffia. Raffia poles look a little like bamboo, and the walls and the floors are made from row upon row of tightly bound raffia stalks, each about two inches in diameter. Some houses are a natural light grey colour, but most are painted yellow, blue, green or brown, with some of them tastefully done up with a two-tone effect, and it was towards one of these structures – a blue-yellow hut – that we paddled.

‘Here is the guesthouse,’ said Evans, pointing to a sign saying ‘Nzulezo Homestay’ that reflected perfectly in the oil-black water. ‘Nice place,’ I said as we docked.

The Nzulezo Homestay is indeed delightful. It consists of a main stilt building with a large veranda and a couple of rooms off the back, plus a separate building containing three rooms, linked by a walkway. I was given the middle room, a nice little affair that had a door that was designed for pygmies (I banged my head almost every time I entered) and wallpaper that had, in a previous incarnation, been a catalogue for an Italian hypermarket that appeared to sell clothes, food, drink, kitchenware, plants, shoes, stationery, umbrellas, luggage and, usefully, chainsaws.

Meanwhile, out on the veranda, I was introduced to Daniel, the proprietor, who handed me the visitors’ book to sign; during the last year around 70 people have stayed in the Nzulezo Homestay, making it one of the less-visited hotels in the region, but that hasn’t stopped the local authority from printing a sign entitled ‘Tourist Ethics’ that Daniel has proudly stuck on the wall inside the veranda. I figured I might as well take a look before we went exploring the village, in case I accidentally committed a terrible faux pas in passing. Starting from the top, I soon came across the following:

Visitors are to put on waterproof footwear and come along with raincoats.

‘Eh? I’m supposed to wear waterproofs?’ I asked Daniel.

‘That’s just for the rainy season,’ he said. ‘It’s OK now.’

‘Ah,’ I said, and continued reading:

Visitors to the stilt village are to wear life jackets. This [sic] will be provided at the visitors centre.

‘Um, I never got a life jacket,’ I said. ‘Should I have one?’

‘You can swim?’ asked Evans.

‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘but I’d really rather not swim here; I’m scared of dark water.’

‘Then it is best you don’t fall in, but you don’t need a life jacket,’ said Evans, and that was that.

Back at the notice, I reached the section entitled ‘Socio-Cultural/Safety Ethics’:

Do not make any provocative or mocking statements when you get to the stilt village.

Do not stand up in the canoe.

Do not make noise in the wetland.

Making love openly at the beach or any of the communities is prohibited.

‘Blimey,’ I said. ‘Are you telling me that you’ve got a problem with people making love on the beach here?’

‘A long time ago, yes,’ said Evans, and I could only assume that back then, the beach was different; these days it seems to be used more for sanitation than procreation, but that’s progress, I guess.

Satisfied that I was unlikely to breach the tourist code, we set off to explore the village. Home to about 500 people, Nzulezo is long and thin, based around a straight main ‘road’ that was recently rebuilt using thick planks of wood rather than raffia, which wears out pretty quickly; the building work was done by Raleigh International, who sent three groups over to work on this and other eco-tourism projects in the area. Houses line the sparklingly new main road, and raffia paths shoot off at right angles between the houses, leading to kitchens that are purposely built away from the houses to prevent the risk of fire. Halfway down the main road is a classroom full of wooden desks, which doubles as a church on Sundays, and at the end of the village, past the chief’s house and two more classrooms, is a dank-looking pond that apparently evaporates in the dry season, providing a football pitch for the kids. And there are kids everywhere, running around with no clothes on, screaming and shouting and totally failing to fall into the lagoon. Evidently the final prohibition in the tourist code doesn’t apply to the locals, and quite right too; what else is there to do at night in an isolated stilt village in the middle of nowhere?

I assumed that sleeping would be a prime occupation in such a backwater, but my hopes that the stilt village would be a tranquil little place to spend the night were rudely dashed by the music I’d heard on arrival. As the night wore on and I retired to my Italian hypermarket to get some rest, the hi-fis continued to do battle, sending ripples through the black water and up the stilts that held my bed aloft. Water is a pretty good conductor of sound, as any scuba diver will tell you, and as I lay there in bed, trying to block the loud thumping out of my mind, I heard the sound of rain pattering down on my raffia roof.

‘Rain!’ I cried, and leapt out of bed; having only seen rain once since leaving home – ages ago in the Gambia – I couldn’t wait to see it, especially on such a black lagoon as this. I flung open my window and stuck my head out, but all I could see were the stars blinking through the haze, reflecting in an undisturbed lake. I listened again, and there it was; the patter of tiny raindrops, but outside it was just another balmy Ghanaian night. And then suddenly the hairs on my neck stood to attention and I realised that I wasn’t hearing the patter of tiny raindrops but the patter of tiny feet, for under the adverts for Italian wine and wellington boots were hundreds of little cockroaches, chewing away at the wood and digging little homes for themselves. I reached for my torch and switched it on, and sure enough the room shifted as hundreds of little brown bodies scurried back into the lingerie section. I wasn’t alone.

‘Bloody hell, now I know what hippies mean by a bad trip,’ I mumbled as I unrolled my mosquito net and tried to sleep among the sound of cockroaches nibbling in time to the Ghanaian music that throbbed through the oily lagoon.

The Migration

As I lay there trying to con myself that it really was raining outside and that the cockroaches were nothing more than the product of a fertile imagination, I thought about a story Evans had told me about why the Nzulezo people lived on stilts. I’d pointed to a rectangular raffia box on stilts just outside the village, and Evans had told me it was a shrine to the gods of the river and that it was all part of the story of the migration.

Some 600 years ago a group of people were hounded from their homes in the Lake Chad area and they fled south on foot. Following their snail god (I guess it was a slow journey) they settled in various places throughout what is now Ghana, but their enemies kept finding them. After a long journey they finally reached the mouth of the River Amansuri, which still feeds the lagoon today. Their snail god started swimming up the river, so they cut down a bunch of raffia trees and made rafts, one per family, and eventually settled in a place called Pinea, on the opposite side of the lagoon to where Nzulezo is today; this is where they first built a village using stilts, because there was simply no land for them to build conventional houses on.

Originally there were 45 chiefs who led the people, but despite building their kitchens separately from the houses, the village kept burning down, until all but one of the chiefs had given up and moved on to what is now Côte d’Ivoire; this chief’s name was Takarika. One day an elder from the village, a man called Mogae, went fishing on the other side of the lagoon, and he noticed that the wind blew less on that side, so there would be less risk of the kitchen fires being caught by the wind and destroying the village. Takarika therefore moved his whole tribe across the lagoon and built the new village of Nzulezo.

Meanwhile the villagers’ old enemies finally caught up with them and were determined to sort them out once and for all. However the gods of the river changed the water into land, which enticed the enemy to advance towards the village, and when they were in the middle of the lagoon, the gods turned it back into water and they all drowned. Apparently this all happened on a Thursday, so on Thursdays nobody goes fishing. Also once a year, on a specific Monday, sacrifices of sheep and fowl are made at the raffia shrine to honour the river gods, and because of this nobody is allowed to fish before 4pm on Mondays. I guess everyone needs a weekend, whatever your religion.

The underlying message of this story is that the villagers built their village on stilts, miles away from the nearest land, because they wanted peace. It wasn’t for the fishing and it obviously wasn’t for the farming, it was because here they were safe from their enemies and they could live in peace.

At least, this is the reason that Evans gave me when I asked him why the villagers lived on water. As modern technology thumped a heavy bass-line through the lagoon towards my cockroach-infested raffia bedroom, I presumed that for the followers of the river gods, the times they are a-changin’.

Fort Apollonia

Early the next morning, after a fitful night’s sleep and a quick breakfast, Evans and I paddled back to Beyin, stopping only to say hello to the fishermen and to admire the little catfish they were pulling from their nets. Perhaps it was because I was tired, but Evans was starting to get on my nerves; I ended up having to pay for his accommodation and meal, which wouldn’t have been a problem if someone had mentioned beforehand that it was all going to end up on my bill, and he then scribbled his address on a piece of paper and handed it to me, saying, ‘Here is my address, so you can send me copies of your photos. Oh, and you can give me my tip now.’

‘Yeah,’ I thought, ‘here’s a tip. How about learning to say “please” instead of being a presumptive little bastard?’ But I still handed him some cedis, and once he’d gone I unceremoniously dumped his address in the first bin I came to, which happened to be outside Fort Apollonia, Beyin’s other tourist attraction.

According to the animated caretaker I tracked down, Fort Apollonia was built by the British in 1768, which makes it the most modern fort along the coast. In a bizarre turn of events the British gave it to the Dutch in 1820, but it wasn’t long before the Dutch decided to leave West Africa; however the British were concerned that the Dutch would hand the fort to their allies, the Ashanti, instead of handing it back to the British, so during the British-Ashanti war the British bombarded it and took it back by force.

It’s now home to a basic guesthouse, a couple of incredibly gloomy slave dungeons and the ubiquitous mouldy white walls that all Ghana’s coastal forts seem to have. But it wasn’t home to much else, so having exhausted Beyin’s attractions, I sat down on the side of the road and waited for transport east to Axim.

Axim

Written: 8 January 2003

I wanted to visit Axim ever since I read that not only is it home to some of the most beautiful beaches in the whole of Ghana, but the town also boasts Fort St Anthony, ‘one of the most impressive forts in Ghana’ according to the guidebook. After a stuttered but easy journey from Beyin, consisting of a tro-tro, two shared taxis and a private taxi, I discovered that the first part was absolutely spot on; following the guidebook’s advice I took a bungalow at the Axim Beach Hotel and settled into a life of luxury to recoup on the sleep that had eluded me in the stilt village.

The Axim Beach Hotel is a little paradise, perched on a high cliff overlooking the majestically sweeping Awangazule Beach as it curves off to the southeast. My beautifully appointed self-contained bungalow was a serious improvement on the cockroach-infested hypermarket of the night before, and with two huge double beds to jump around on, I was in heaven. Sure, the room cost me 150,000 cedis a night, some three times the price of my room in Kokrobite and ten times the price of the guesthouse in Kakum, but a little bit of maths soon justified the expense; my beach paradise was costing me a little over £11 a night, a pittance for such a treat.

To shake the remnants of Nzulezo from my mind, I took a stroll along the beach, an uninhabited curve that’s lined with palm trees, an inland lagoon and coconut palms that look like they’ve been attacked by low-flying planes. All along this stretch of the coast the coconuts are suffering from a blight that kills the trees, making all the leaves fall off and leaving nothing but tall, thin trunks; thankfully Awangazule Beach has an awful lot of greenery besides the coconut palms and it’s still a lovely stretch of beach to wander along. The sea is vicious here, but I’ve never been one for swimming in the sea, so with a huge sigh of relaxation I settled in for my first day of doing nothing since leaving Kokrobite.

Fort St Anthony

The second boast in the guidebook turned out to be a little overenthusiastic, though I think some of my disappointment in Fort St Anthony was down to an overdose of coastal forts. After a few tours you realise that every fort has the same collection of stories, and while the dates might change, the experience is pretty much the same. For example, Fort St Anthony has male and female dungeons, and of course the colonial officers – in this case the Portuguese and the Dutch – would pick out the prettiest female slaves and rape them; it has officers’ quarters and rooms for the governor; it has lots of blackened cannons pointing out to sea; it has a large cistern, fed by rainwater; and it has a caretaker who will take you round for a small fee (or, in my case, a caretaker who will deputise his young son to do the job). It’s not quite true to say that once you’ve seen one fort you’ve seen them all, but after a while you stop noticing the slave dungeons and the mouldy whitewashed battlements and you start noticing the little oddities that differentiate each fort.

Fort St Anthony, the second oldest fort in Ghana after St George’s in Elmina, is home to the biggest flock of vultures that I’ve ever seen. Perched in rows on the roof of the castle, which was completed in 1515 by the Portuguese, these huge birds swoop majestically in loops round the turrets, landing on the battlements and adding an eerie poignancy to the dismal atmosphere of the slave dungeons. The Dutch captured the fort in 1642 and traded slaves on a small scale until the abolition of the slave trade in 1807; the three dungeons – for men, women and children – only held about 25 slaves each, but by the time the Dutch sold the fort to the British the vultures had moved on to dead goats instead of dead slaves.

The young boy who took me round spoke so quickly and with such a hurried accent that I kept having to ask him to repeat himself, but after showing me what he claimed was the first clock in Ghana, he took me to the euphemistically named guesthouse where his baby sister, who’d been balanced on her brother’s hip throughout the tour, filled her nappies with a stench from hell, thus speeding up the boy’s presentation to the point where I didn’t understand a single word. But it didn’t really matter, because the guesthouse – two totally empty rooms with not even a mattress for those bold enough to sleep here – was full of a particular kind of junk that fascinates me; it was teeming with the detritus of bureaucracy.

Before opening up as a tourist attraction, Fort St Anthony was an office of the Ghana Education Board, and while moving out someone had obviously decided to take a whole box of paperwork and throw it on the floor. I was fascinated, and once the guide had stumbled his way through the rest of the tour and headed off to clean up his sister, I returned to the guesthouse to pick my way through the papers. There was all sorts of fascinating rubbish there: a 1998 Ghanaian languages syllabus for primary schools; a completed form from the annual school census of 1998/9; a copy of a 1971 University of London Examination Board certificate for a Mr Ebenezer Christian Andoh of Takoradi, who managed to get passes at O-Level in economics, geography and religious knowledge; a hand-written letter, dated 1987, from a hopeful applicant for a job as a teacher in a primary school; essays from a secondary school exam dated 25 September 1992, the subject of which was teenage pregnancy; and strewn all around the room were flat files, crumpled carbon papers and piles of letters.

I spent a good half an hour poking through the remains of what was once someone’s job, before noticing something intriguing pinned to the door under the sign saying ‘General Office’. Someone had taken a piece of cardboard and drawn an eight-segment pie chart on it, under a heading saying ‘Movement Chart’. Each of the segments had something written in it, and pinned to the centre was a little paper arrow that you could turn to point to one of the segments. The options were ‘Out’, ‘Break’, ‘Travel to Accra Headquarters’, ‘Messages to Institutions’, ‘To: Regional Office’, ‘Closed Work’, ‘Waite’ [sic], and ‘To Main Office’, each neatly written in biro.

The arrow was pointing to ‘Break’, which, given the state of the office, I felt was a little too optimistic, even by Ghanaian standards. Taking one more look round the bleak interior of the ex-Ghana Education Board, I moved the arrow to ‘Closed Work’ and shuffled out of the door, leaving Fort St Anthony to the vultures.

Busua

Written: 10 January 2003

It wasn’t Busua’s fault that I didn’t like the place. Located between Axim and Takoradi along the western half of the Ghanaian coast, Busua boasts a beautiful beach, a colonial fort in neighbouring Dixcove, safe swimming, and a chance to kick back once again from the rigours of African life. Unfortunately I left Axim with a familiar gurgling in my stomach, and by the time I got to Busua, exhausted from another buttock-clenching bounce along the roads of Ghana, I had no idea whether I wanted to relax on the beach or kick the local dogs.

One thing was for certain, though; I wasn’t in the mood for tout hassle, vacant staff, cliquey company and grumbling thunder, all of which Busua happily provided within two minutes of my arrival. The Alaska Beach Club, a collection of picturesque huts right on the beach, looked at first like another Big Milly’s, but without a compound wall between it and the beach it was nothing but a haven for schoolboy touts and people trying to sell me water, biscuits and kayak trips. The biggest irritation was the proliferation of guides who were desperately willing to take me over the headland to visit the crumbling Fort Metal Cross in Dixcove; the 15-minute path between Busua and Dixcove is notorious for muggings and it’s wise to take a local with you as the thieves don’t want anyone there who can recognise them. This is all fine and good – though the development of a lucrative guiding business doesn’t exactly motivate the community to stamp out the muggings themselves – but when I realised that everyone I met on the beach was eventually going to try to get me to take them as a guide, it got horribly wearing.

Meanwhile the skies clouded up and were, like me, making ominous rumbling sounds, and as the only other people on the beach were travellers from the two large trans-Africa trucks parked in the Alaska’s grounds, I felt quite alone; they stuck to their own groups, leaving me and James Michener alone with the touts.

This unexpectedly disappointing vibe brought on a serious epiphany, right there on the beach. I’ve been wondering for a while how I’m going to feel when I go home, and whether I’m actually going to fly out to Kenya after a short break at home. Back on the beach, I managed to boil it all down into two questions.

The first was ‘What do you really want to do now?’ and the answer is an emphatic ‘I want to go home.’ I’ve been toying with the idea of spending a few more weeks in Ghana, exploring the Volta region and the north, but on the beach in Busua I realised that actually I want to go home, I’m just too scared to admit it to myself after planning this year-long trip for the last four years. So there and then I decided that when I got back to Accra I’d buy the first available flight home, and with this decision came massive relief; for the first time I realised that my trip is effectively over.

The second question was ‘What do you really want to do when you get back?’ and the seemingly contradictory answer is that I still want to go travelling. I’ve spent the last four years building up to a year on the road, but the last four months have changed my mind... and still I want to explore, despite the terrible homesickness. And then it struck me, in a moment of clarity: plenty of people travel in the UK, but I’ve never bothered to explore it. I know bucket-loads about Australia, India, New Zealand, Mali and all sorts of other exotic countries, but I know nothing about the UK, and if I want to continue travelling but still be close to home, then why not travel while staying close to home? What a simple solution.

So Busua’s sweeping beach and its colonial fort didn’t get a visit from me because I’ve now got another plan. Instead of visiting Fort Metal Cross I got up at the crack of dawn the next day and practically ran out of town, glad to be away from the touts, the salespeople and the cliquey truckers, and even happier to be heading back to Accra and its airport.

Indeed, I was so happy with my newfound direction that I stopped off at Kokrobite for three days, just in time to catch Lukas as he hit the road again after six weeks learning the drums. The leaving bash at his place was a delight, and with him moving on and me planning a different kind of trip, it felt like a good way to close my chapter on West Africa. And not only that, I also met Paul and Hannah, a lovely couple whom I’d originally met in the Gambia, and we swapped by-now-familiar stories of just how awful Mali can be, and what a demonic pit from hell Mopti really is. It felt good, but even more amusing was them reminding me of an off-the-cuff comment I’d made to them back in Jangjang Bureh.

‘You remember back in the Gambia when we asked you why you’d chosen to travel through West Africa?’ said Hannah. ‘And you said: “You know, I’ve been asking myself the same question recently.” Well, we’ve been telling people all along the trail about that, and you were spot on, you know.’

So despite the hassles of Busua and my plan to leave Ghana earlier than expected, I feel good. I’m not alone in thinking West Africa is a disappointment, I’ve survived the hardest travelling I’ve ever had to tackle, and I actually want to go home, and for a positive reason. How can I complain about that?

Visiting Jimmy Moxon

Written: 16 January 2003

It was on Christmas Day back in 1998 that I first heard about Jimmy Moxon, the Gentleman Chief of Ghana. The family was gathered around the dining room table, tucking into another legendary turkey lunch, when the subject strayed onto my recent travels. This led naturally to the plans for my next trip, and when I mentioned that I hoped to travel to Africa one day, my Dad said, ‘You should try to visit Jimmy Moxon while you’re out there. He’s a genuine African chief, you know.’

I didn’t really believe him at the time, but when I started planning my trip to West Africa I remembered what he’d said and asked him if he’d been pulling my leg.

‘Nope, it’s all true,’ he replied, and pulled out a collection of magazines from the Moxon Society that showed a white man clad in the garish regalia of an African chief. From that moment I decided that when I got to Ghana I’d just have to find out more; there aren’t that many Moxons on this planet, and there certainly aren’t many African chiefs among them.

The Gentleman Chief

Jimmy Moxon is an intriguing figure from Ghana’s colourful history, and although I had precious little information to go on, it seemed like the perfect opportunity for a bit of journalism. The story, as far as I know it, is that Jimmy moved to Ghana to work for the colonial civil service during World War II and stayed on after the war to become a District Commissioner; when independence came in 1957 he was persuaded to stay on by President Nkrumah, who appointed him as his Orwellian-sounding Minister for Information. When Jimmy retired in 1963 he was made a genuine African chief, one of a tiny number of white men ever to be officially gazetted as such. There have been quite a few honorary chiefs in Africa, like Shirley Temple Black and Isaac Hayes, but I only know of two non-Africans who became real chiefs: Jimmy Moxon was one, and the other was the American Lloyd Shirer (who become Maligu-Naa of the Dagumba tribe, or ‘Chief of the Preparations’). Jimmy died in 1999 and is buried in the grounds of his old home just a few miles north of Accra, and seeing as I was in the area, it seemed like a good idea to ask around for pointers.

As luck would have it, Mr Prempeh gave me my first lead. When I mentioned Jimmy Moxon and the fact that I was looking for information on him and his life, Mr Prempeh said he had not only met Jimmy himself on a number of occasions, but that an old school friend of his just happened to live in the house next door to Jimmy’s. Meanwhile, back in Kokrobite, I met a couple of lovely people on the beach who gave me further pointers, saying that Jimmy’s old house was OK to visit and someone was living on the site who could probably show me round. It seemed like the perfect excuse for a bit of exploring, so on Thursday, 16 January, Mr Prempeh and I hopped into his car and headed off into the hills.

The hills north of Accra have long been a haven for those wanting to escape from the rigours of city life, and as soon as you cross the police barrier on the northern outskirts of the city, it’s obvious why. The Akuapem Hills rise straight out of the coastal plains on which Accra squats, and once you pass the city limits you can see that these hills are a wonderful haven of greenery, unspoilt views and the kind of drifting breeze that makes air conditioning unnecessary. It’s true that suburban Accra is itself surprisingly green, sprinkled with vacant plots of land overgrown with wild grasses and tortured bushes, but outside the city border there’s a definite switch; instead of being a mass of buildings with a smattering of greenery, the landscape becomes a mass of greenery with a smattering of buildings, and five minutes after the barrier it’s hard to believe you’re still within spitting distance of Accra.

As with hill stations throughout the world, the Akuapem Hills have long provided a retreat for the rich and famous; as you wind up the switchback road from the Accran plains, trying not to look down as yet another tro-tro tears past you with the driver riding its worn brakes through the hairpins, you pass the peaceful presidential compound that Nkrumah built as an escape from the rigours of politics down in the capital. With its concrete buildings peeling in the sun it’s now little more than a faded memory of what it used to be, but thankfully there are plans to do it up; the hills are home to some of the most wonderfully extravagant hideaways and currently the presidential retreat is one of the less pleasant examples as you wind up the road, though it does give an appropriate historical context to Jimmy’s home turf.

The Akuapem Hills are best known for the botanical gardens at Aburi, but we had a different destination in mind. Jimmy’s old house is in Kitase, a small village just north of the presidential retreat, and after enlisting the help of one of the staff from the house of Mr Prempeh’s friend (who, unfortunately, wasn’t in) we followed his directions and drove slowly up a steep grassy drive, past a couple of houses where the locals gleefully pointed us further uphill. We finally arrived at the top of a drive that you wouldn’t like to attempt in a normal car, and there, at the top of the long and winding road, was Jimmy’s domain.

My first impression of Jimmy’s place was that it feels just like a botanical garden; everywhere is lusciously green, without a hint of concrete, gravel or tarmac. After Accra it was utterly delightful, and we hopped out of the Range Rover to see a sprightly man walking up the drive towards us.

‘Hello,’ we said, and introduced ourselves, apologising for turning up unannounced. When I came to shake the man’s hand, I told him my name and his eyes lit up.

‘Moxon, like Mr Jimmy Moxon?’ he asked, eyes wide.

‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘I’m a Moxon too. I hope it’s all right to pay a visit to Jimmy’s house.’

‘Ah!’ he cried, grinning from ear to ear. ‘It’s wonderful – you are very welcome.’ And with that I met the wonderful Frank Eliott Apaw, Jimmy’s caretaker and cook who looked after Jimmy for 30 years in both Accra and Kitase. It was immediately evident that Frank really loved Jimmy; when he spoke about his late master he smiled with his eyes in the way that the Ghanaians do when excited, and with a jump in his step Frank insisted on taking us on a tour of the grounds.

As Jimmy’s domain stretches over the side of a steep hill, it is split into two levels, the upper level at the top of a steep cliff and the lower level at the foot of that cliff. The steep grass drive we climbed to reach Jimmy’s house winds round to the right of the cliff, while a couple of stone staircases wind up the cliff, one following the drive and the other joining the two levels on the left. On top of the cliff are two houses; looking up from the lower level, Jimmy’s house is on the right-hand end of the cliff, and the house of the new owners, Mr and Mrs Hans Roth, is on the left-hand side. Behind the houses the garden slopes away from the cliff towards the neighbours, and it was into this garden that Frank led us, an excited spring in his step.

‘Here is Mr Moxon’s grave,’ he said, steering us to a small garden next to Jimmy’s house. ‘You are the first Moxon to visit here since the funeral; I’m really thrilled.’

‘So am I,’ I said, and I meant it, for Jimmy’s grave is a delightful resting place. Set in a well-tended oval-shaped bed of tropical plants, the grave itself is a square paved area, connected to the lawn by a short path. Behind the paving is a lovely rectangular pillar that carries a plaque with the dates of Jimmy’s life, and his epitaph ‘A loyal son of the empire and a true son of Ghana’, but what grabs the attention is the beautiful sculpted head set into the pillar. Even though I’ve only seen photographs of Jimmy – alas, he died before I managed to pester him in his hillside retreat – the effigy captures the mix of reminiscences I’ve heard from his friends. At first glance the sculpture conveys a great sense of authority and honour – the hallmarks of a loyal son of the empire – but on closer inspection there’s a definite twinkle in the eye, and it’s obvious that with the slightest excuse this face would crack a smile; indeed, this sculpture really is of a true son of Ghana.

The Gardens

Africa is littered with colonial graveyards that echo with the indignity of being left for Mother Nature to reclaim, but Jimmy’s garden is not one of them. A sloping lawn of thick-leaved tropical grass weaves through a collection of trees and plants that hide the neighbouring houses so effectively you could be forgiven for thinking you’re totally isolated, and just down from Jimmy’s grave sits a tall, thin tree that might not be the most physically significant tree in the garden, but is easily the best-known.

‘This is an important tree,’ said Frank. ‘Make sure you get out your camera – this is the onyasse, the silk cotton tree. You know about the silk cotton tree?’

‘I sure do,’ I said and snapped away. When Jimmy was enstooled as a sub-chief, or Ankobea, of the Adonten Division of Akuapem in 1963, his official title was Nana Kofi Obonyaa, Odikra of Onyasse; the last part means ‘chief of the area between the cliff and the silk cotton tree’, which perfectly describes the place where Jimmy built his house and where he is now buried. Silk cotton trees are beautiful things, their trunks sloping outwards at the base into fins that, in an unkempt environment like a rainforest, harbour all sorts of exotic quagmires of mosses and ferns. Jimmy’s silk cotton tree, however, harbours little except the roots of a good story, much the same as his house.

Jimmy’s house is as modest as the views are fantastic. It’s a long, rectangular bungalow, simply constructed and decidedly unfussy, and although the rooms are empty and there’s an air of retirement about the place, it’s not hard to imagine daily life chez Moxon. Approaching the house from the silk cotton tree, you pass a flat area where a sign hangs proclaiming this to be a palm wine bar; as party venues go, it’s hard to imagine anything more conducive than a barbecue on a beautiful lawn, shaded by exotic trees, with palm wine – the most natural alcoholic drink known to man – being served by the heady glassful.

But up past the entertainment area is where you’re hit by the real charm of life in a hill station. Attached to the left-hand end of the house there’s a small semicircular lawn that commands breathtaking views of the sweeping Akuapem Hills. This lawn is the ahinfie, or the chief’s palace, and a couple of thin columns at the apex of the semicircle provide the official entrance to Jimmy’s domain. It’s on this lawn that Chief Moxon would perform his duties.

‘Mr Moxon would sit here from teatime to sunset every day,’ said Frank. ‘This is where he would meet with people, talk with the other chiefs, or just sit and work.’

As I stood there soaking up the views and thinking what a wonderful place this would be for a spot of quiet writing, I noticed something odd in the veranda wall along the side of the house. Set into the brickwork I could see three vertical rods, and on each of these rods were two rounded shapes; I squatted down to take a closer look and noticed that the shapes rotated on the poles.

‘What on earth are these?’ I asked Frank. ‘They look like fat Tibetan prayer wheels.’

‘Ha, no, they are not prayer wheels,’ said Frank. ‘Do you know about the Black Pot Restaurant?’

‘Sure,’ I replied. Frank was talking about the two restaurants Jimmy opened in Accra; they specialised in African cuisine but unfortunately went out of business in the 1970s due to chronic food shortages.

‘Well, these are the original black pots from the restaurant,’ said Frank. ‘I was the head chef there, you know.’

‘You were?’ I said.

‘Yes, I was,’ said Frank, proudly.

‘Then Jimmy must have eaten well,’ I said, ‘having you as his cook,’ and Frank smiled as he took me along the side of the house, pointing out the different rooms. This one used to be the office, that one the kitchen, and this one the main room, each of them now empty and gathering dust. At the back of the house is a locked door that was once a room for the house staff, and faint chalk writing is still visible along the middle of the door: ‘God is good all the time’ it says in true Ghanaian style.

The Lower Level

Peering over the edge of the cliff and down a crumbling set of stone steps, I spotted a dried-up swimming pool and started to walk down to it, but Frank yelled that the steps weren’t safe and that we should walk down the grass drive to the lower level. But first he pointed proudly to the bungalow at the far end of the lower level’s lawn.

‘That is my house,’ he said. ‘Mr Moxon gave it to me, and that is where I live with my family.’

‘It’s lovely,’ I said, meaning it; Frank’s house is on the edge of a huge lawn, and like the garden on the upper level, the number of trees and bushes has to be seen to be believed.

‘Let’s go take a look,’ said Frank, and we trundled off down the drive to check out his house. Originally from the Volta Region in eastern Ghana, Frank spent 22 years working for Jimmy in Accra before Jimmy persuaded him to move to Kitase in 1990. Things weren’t quite as comfortable back then, and the evidence is strewn around the lower level, most notably in the form of a rusting and comically tiny caravan, which Jimmy bought in England back in 1983 and which served as his home while construction work continued. Not only was the accommodation pretty basic to start with, the site had no access to water, and water was brought from off-site throughout Jimmy’s time; now Mr Roth has dug a well in the garden to provide running water for everyone and the caravan is nothing more than a memory of distant times.

It is obvious that not only is Frank proud of his home, he’s also proud to have been associated with Jimmy Moxon.

‘I named my daughter Moxon Sarah Apaw as a mark of respect to Mr Moxon,’ he said as he handed me a couple of greeting cards sporting a colour photograph of Jimmy in his chief’s regalia. I’m not surprised at Frank’s loyalty; during my visit to Ghana I’ve met quite a few people who knew Jimmy, and every single one of them has been full of praise for a man who was without a doubt one of the genuine characters of post-war Ghana.

Pouring Petrol on the Flames

Written: 17 January 2003

Ghana’s economy has taken a bit of a battering over the last few years, but I still wasn’t prepared for the shock that the government unleashed on the population this morning. Today the price of a gallon of petrol has increased from 10,500 cedis to a whopping 20,000 cedis, just like that. That’s an increase of over 90 per cent overnight.

The main reason for the increase is depressingly simple. The state-run Tema Oil Refinery, Ghana’s main refinery, is in debt to the tune of 4.5 trillion cedis (that’s 4,500,000,000,000 cedis, or around £330 million) and the debt is getting bigger all the time. Official explanations of this huge debt are vague, to say the least, but the words ‘corruption’ and ‘inefficiency’ crop up throughout Ghana’s top-selling daily newspaper, the Daily Graphic, and at least one important official has been sacked as a result.

Other factors behind the price hike include the rising price of crude oil due to the Iraqi crisis and the strikes in Venezuela, and the large fall in the value of the cedi against the dollar, which is used to set the global price for oil. However, one thing’s for sure: doubling the price of petrol, diesel, kerosene and other petroleum products is guaranteed to increase the cost of pretty much everything else, from obvious things like transport to less obvious things like food. On top of this there were long queues at the petrol stations before the price hikes, not just because the government had intimated it would have to increase prices, but because some unscrupulous petrol stations pretended that they’d run dry, while secretly hoarding the cheaper petrol until they could sell it at the higher price after the rise. With the public desperate to fill their tanks before the change, it all added up to a nightmare at the pumps before the price moved an inch.

I don’t know enough about Ghanaian politics to know whether price hikes like this are common, but electricity prices were increased by 60 per cent last year, after low rainfall reduced output from the Lake Volta hydroelectric plant at Akosombo. I hope this isn’t an indication that Ghana is starting to fall apart; if it is, it’s a demonstration that, unfair though it is, war, weather and world economic downturns affect developing countries the most.

Thoughts on Leaving

Written: 19 January 2003

Throughout West Africa I’ve met people doing a similar journey to mine, but in the opposite direction. In Mali I met lots of people who came from Ghana via Burkina Faso, and the one consistent impression I got from them was that Ghana is by far the most relaxed and easygoing country in the region. Within a few seconds of crossing the Ghanaian border, I knew they were right; here people smile, joke and laugh in a way that they simply don’t in Senegal and Mali. And for someone whose French is adequate but not fluent, the joy I felt on hearing English again was palpable.

Irritatingly I lost my drive in Ghana, not because of Ghana, but because I finally realised I need to go home; I therefore failed to explore Ghana in great detail, instead concentrating on the coast west of Accra, where I lazed on the beach and hid from the hassles of Africa. But even though I haven’t seen as much of Ghana as I have of Mali, Senegal and so on, I’ve fallen in love with the place; Ghana is a perfect place for travelling, and as an introduction to African travel, it’s hard to beat.

This is strange, because although Ghana has some wonderful tourist attractions, it isn’t reeling in world-famous destinations. Mali has the global brand of Timbuktu, but Ghana doesn’t have an equivalent; Accra, Kumasi, Cape Coast and Elmina are all great places, but none of them are household names. But to look at Ghana in terms of tourist attractions is a mistake, because the real stars of Ghana are the people.

They say that you visit West Africa for the people and East Africa for the animals, and when it comes to Ghana, this is spot on. I found the Ghanaians to be wonderfully friendly without the in-your-face annoyance of the Sahel countries; indeed, the most irritating tout I met in Ghana turned out to be a Malian, which sums up the difference rather well. Although Ghana has a few irritating hustlers, notably around the castle at Elmina, it really is possible to walk around the country without being mobbed. It’s delightful.

Not only are the people great, but Ghanaian food is good and plentiful. The view from the bus as you approach Kumasi from the north might hold a clue as to why; after the desolate dryness of the desert, southern Ghana is a veritable Garden of Eden, with greenery absolutely everywhere. From the road you can see food growing on the trees, and it’s instantly obvious that this is a much more comfortable environment than the desert. Sure, Ghana at this time of year still reaps the benefits of the wet season and I’m sure it’s a different story in the dry season, but at the moment southern Ghana is luscious and so is the food. Staples like fufu, kenkey and banku might not be to everyone’s taste, but the sauces that they come with are great, especially if you like spicy food. I’ve ended up regaining all the weight that I lost in the Sahel, and I’ve been ill far less in Ghana than up north; I actually feel well again, and the novelty hasn’t worn off yet.

So Ghana has at last provided me with a taste of West Africa that I actually like. I found travelling in Senegal and Mali difficult, and the pain was not worth the gain; in Ghana, however, there’s been no pain at all, and I have gained a lot. I’ve loved being in Ghana, and the only reason I’m cutting my journey short is because going home is the right thing for me to do; it is not a comment on this delightful country. As Neil Diamond once wrote:

Being lost

Is worth the coming home

In the Sahel, I definitely felt lost. In Ghana I didn’t, but by the time I found myself I knew I had to go home, and even the lovely Ghanaians couldn’t change my mind.

They came close, though.

Further Reading

If you enjoyed this book, you might like to know that there’s a whole series of free books like this available from www.moxon.net, covering 25 countries and six continents:

- The Back of Beyond: Travels in Australia

- Into the Deep Blue Sea: Travels in Belize

- A Town Full of Nothing to Do: Travels in Burkina Faso

- In Search of the Lost City: Travels in Colombia

- Tainted by Tourism: Travels in Costa Rica

- A Funny Sort of Socialism: Travels in Cuba

- Snow on the Sun Loungers: Travels in Cyprus

- Love at First Sight: Travels in El Salvador

- Paradise Has Teeth: Travels in French Polynesia

- A Million Mosquitoes Can’t Be Wrong: Travels in the Gambia

- The Road to Jesus: Travels in Ghana

- Stuck on the Gringo Trail: Travels in Guatemala

- Many Ways to Change Your Mind: Travels in India

- Hello Paul, What’s Your Name? Travels in Indonesia

- The Muddy Confluence: Travels in Malaysia

- The Lapping of the Dunes: Travels in Mali

- A World-Class Dive: Travels in Mexico

- Snaking Patterns of Sand: Travels in Morocco

- Roof of the World: Travels in Nepal

- God’s Own Country: Travels in New Zealand

- Poverty and Paradise: Travels in Nicaragua

- Alone on Two-Palm Island: Travels in Panama

- The Head and the Heart: Travels in Senegal

- Serious Fun: Travels in Singapore

- Melted Meccano: Travels in Thailand

If you know someone who might like any of my books, please pass them on; I make no money from this, but I do enjoy the thought of people reading my books and recommending them to their friends. If you’ve enjoyed reading my writing (or even if you haven’t) I’d be delighted if you could sign my Guestbook at www.moxon.net/guestbook – after all, it’s the feedback that makes it all worthwhile. Happy travels!

THE END

Table of Contents

Preface

The Struggle into Ghana

Kumasi

The Road to Jesus

The Cedi Shuffle

The Auditor-General

Accra

Kokrobite

Turtle Wars

Trucked Off

A Change of Heart

Rastafarian Christmas

Kakum

Down the Den

Drink in a Bag

Cape Coast

Elmina

The Prempeh Room

Nzulezo

Axim

Busua

Visiting Jimmy Moxon

Pouring Petrol on the Flames

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading

Table of Contents

Preface

The Struggle into Ghana

Kumasi

The Road to Jesus

The Cedi Shuffle

The Auditor-General

Accra

Kokrobite

Turtle Wars

Trucked Off

A Change of Heart

Rastafarian Christmas

Kakum

Down the Den

Drink in a Bag

Cape Coast

Elmina

The Prempeh Room

Nzulezo

Axim

Busua

Visiting Jimmy Moxon

Pouring Petrol on the Flames

Thoughts on Leaving

Further Reading