Ghana

Friday

Breakfast this morning was not the oily eggs and thick white bread which we had yesterday, but fresh boiled yam and a sauce made from coal-roasted cherry tomatoes (there’s something you could make a killing off at Borough Market), aubergines and dried fish, all ground together and mixed with violent red palm oil. The meal was eaten, with the hands, at the 21-acre farm of Mr Atta, an 83 year old man with thick white chest hair and all his own teeth. We walked for 2 miles through the dewy forest at day-break to get to this splendid example of exceptional health, both the owner and everything around him, through forests where the cocoa pods dripped from trees, nestling for space on the silvery trunks.

Mr Atta’s 14 year old grandson, Isaac, shares the small mud house with him, and before school cleans the compound and cooks breakfast. There are two other houses in the ‘village’, both mud homes where the farm labourers live. One of them, who spent the morning cutting the husks off coconuts for us to take back to the village, is from the north of Ghana. While we were eating the yams, crouched on stools around the tin bowl, he played the balafon in a dark corner of the cook-house, a young girl sitting near him scraping food from a bowl. The hot coals of fire hissed nearby.

“When I come home from school, when I have done all my jobs, I read my school books,” Isaac, the grandson, told me shyly. “When it gets dark, we have a lantern, so I can keep on reading.”

Isaac carried a basket containing 30 oranges and 10 coconuts on his head, the whole way to school for me.

***

“Can she use the pit?” asked an old man whose house I had been taken to so I could go to the loo.

“Of course I can use the pit,” I said. I am, after all, hardened to the worst kind of African loos. Nothing disgusts me anymore in that department.

‘The Pit’ was terrifying. Wooden planks suspended over a hole six foot long and as many deep. Down below the mass of shit writhed with white maggots. For some reason, I could not stop staring at it, even though I was appalled.