Ghana notes

Tuesday

Workmen in tiny Kumasi airport stood on bending planks suspended over high scaffolding frames and sanded the new wooden ceiling. Like parquet flooring, the ceiling shone in herring bone patterns, whereas the floor was tiled in bare ordinary squares. The ceiling at the spotless Precise Lodge was built from the same, proud, wooden slats. I thought about the moulding concrete-and-plaster ceilings of the average hotel in Senegal, and wondered, why.

*****

A two-part article in the daily newspaper expounded on the subject of heartbreak. I left the paper in the seat pocket of the 30-seater plane, and wished I hadn’t.

“Women, I hear,” professed the male journalist, “have more people to talk to about their heartbreak; hair-dressers, taxi drivers, and Aunties.”

It reminds me of the old taxi-driver who gave me a lift in Dakar, a year and a half ago. For some reason, I had told him a secret that had been on my mind for months.

So much more than a taxi service, my friend had said when I told her to whom I had spilled my heart.

*****

Kumasi market is the largest open-air market in west Africa. It is vast, a city of tin roofs with suburbs of yam-sellers within; roads of meat-vendors give way to underwear neighbourhoods; bulk toothpaste streets hustling against the tailors sewing strips of kingly kente cloth.

The yam sellers, all women, were the most gregarious. They pummelled my skin, their ugly bulbous yams sitting by dusty and grey, blobs of pink and green paint to identify their size and price. Piles of dried fish balanced in headstands on tin platters, while their young girl vendors sat behind and called out their worth. A teenage girl with dark blue tattoos on her forehead bustled for a photo, but refused to stay still long enough for me to take it. Again and again, they asked me if Aubrey was my husband or my brother, and when I said, friend, they all laughed and eyed me disbelievingly, like I was telling them a dirty joke.

In one row, a girl sold patchwork cloth, strips of tattered faded fabric in large, thoughtless blocks. She asked me if I wanted to buy it, and I pointed to my own patchwork skirt and told her I could make my own.

“Yes yes, this is fine-fine,” a lady laughed approvingly, crouching on a stool nearby and grabbing at my skirt.

When I told them I lived in Senegal they all laughed again and asked the little girl with the elephantine belly button if she wanted to go home with Auntie Rose to Canada.

Saturday night, and I was on my way to see Omar the Tailor, to pick up my silk sleeping bag for the trip to Ghana. Winding my way through the back of the bus station as darkness fell, I received a phone call from the photographer, Aubrey, in Liberia, who I was to meet on the Slok flight on Sunday morning. Our flight, he said, had been cancelled. The airline said they could get him on a Belleview flight on Tuesday, but apart from that, there was nothing to be done.

Aubrey, once a next-door neighbour from London, and I are meeting delegates from a chocolate company in Ghana on Tuesday. They are taking us out to a remote village to meet cocoa farmers. We have to get to Accra before Tuesday, or we will likely lose the trip. Slok, the Gambia National carrier (this had rung warning bells in my ears), are famously unreliable, cancelling flights five minutes before take-off and forgetting to stop in the cities along the way, leaving passengers for Monrovia stranded in Freetown, with no way of returning.

“These planes,” said Vijay, my young Indian travel agent, “are like buses. They should not be going in the air.”

While Omar finished up my bag, the machines in the atelier rattling away, I called Vijay and asked him if he knew anything about it. He said he would ring Slok and call me back. Five minutes later, as I tried to explain to Omar what The Independent magazine is and why it matters if I don’t leave for Accra on Sunday, Vijay rang me back to say he had rung Slok in Dakar, who knew nothing about the cancellations and were still selling tickets, who had rung Banjul to discover that all planes have been grounded for a month. “The planes,” explained Vijay, “are past their expiration date. Some planes can stay for one hundred and twenty five years, some for one hundred and fifty.”

“And Slok planes,” I asked, intrigued to know how old Vijay thought they were, “how old are they?”

“Maybe two hundred years. Yes. They should not be going in the air.”

“What am I going to do?” I wanted to know.

“I will get you to Accra tomorrow madam, please do not worry. I will call you back.”

Ten minutes later, with Omar sitting beneath the glow of the atelier light in wonder at this back and forth of text messages to Liberia (Aubrey trying to get on a UN flight), the chocolate company in London, and various friends who have all flown Slok and who all have their own techniques as to how to deal with the inevitable cancellations, Vijay rang me back to tell me the good news.

“I get you on a flight to Abidjan and then you will stay in transit to Accra. It is two hundred thousand francs more. And I must issue the ticket tonight or else you will lose it.”

I hadn’t yet heard from the chocolate company to know if I should pay the extra money. “How late can you issue the ticket,” I asked him, “before we lose it?”

“Madam, I do not go to the night club, I am here with my laptop. If you call me at twelve or one o clock in the morning I will issue the ticket. Please do not worry about this.”

Promising to call him back, I sat down with Omar and we decided to make a scarf out of the remaining strip of silk. It was nine o clock before we finished, and Omar walked me home.

“It is easy for you to create things,” Omar said, and I felt pleased. Senegalese do not give compliments that often. “You can see nice things quickly.”

This morning, I went out to get money for the ticket. Outside the cash machine, boys hung around selling Herald Tribunes and top-up phone cards.

“Do you have a card for twenty-five thousand?” I asked a young boy who held a strip of the orange and black cards, flapping them in my face.

“No,” he said, sucking his teeth. “Buy ten thousand.”

I ignored him and crossed the road, but heard a loud hissing, turning into, “oh-ho”, from behind me. The same boy was pushing his friend towards me, his friend holding out a card for 25,000 francs. I bought one, and the two boys slunk back to their post outside the cash machine.

*****

Vijay’s office overlooks the smelliest place in Dakar. One day, when they have finished digging the tunnel that will turn the road into a veritable super highway, of exactly the same size as it was before, it will be well positioned. But for now, the office is constantly covered in dust, the air outside is indigestible because pits of raw sewage lie festering and open, and the men who sit about like spare parts beside the road works, waiting for something exciting to happen, hiss and shout, following you with waving hands if you try to make your way to the office.

“Where are you going?” they demand aggressively, as you climb over random pieces of metal and rocks to get to the front door. “What is your business here?”

It doesn’t occur to them that I may in fact be going to the row of shops overlooking the roadworks, and not about to climb down into the works themselves. They must think toubabs are really stupid. Or perhaps they have nothing better to do.

Now I ignore them and walk on. Let them follow me, if they want.

Vijay is inside the office, his motorbike also parked inside. He has opened up the agency for me, on a Sunday morning.

Quickly, he prints me out my ticket. He asks me if I am with Reuters or Associated Press.

“Neither,” I say, and tell him who I work for.

“So that means when Kenya Airways crashes you have to go to Doula and things like that?”

“Um, not exactly, but that kind of thing, yes,” I say, unsure.

“Okay well have a good journey anyway,” he laughs.

*****

‘First time in Africa!’ exclaims the board in the smoky hotel lobby. ‘Broadband internet in the rooms!’

I telephone the front desk to ask for the password for the internet router.

“Twelve dollars for twenty four hours,” drawls the man on the other end of the phone, the cable of which I have to hold in place for a clear line.

*****

At the airport, my hotel bus hasn’t arrived. I go to the hotel information desk and ask the young man if he can help me.

“Do you have a reservation? Can I see your proof of confirmation please?”

I tell him I have no proof that anyone confirmed my booking, although I’m sure someone did, but could he call the hotel anyway and ask them to come and pick me up.

“I can give you the number of the hotel, but I can not call them for you unless I can see your proof of confirmation,” he says. I can not bear to continue this conversation and take a taxi.

Dakar is going through sudden gentrification. Over the last year or so, shiny night spots and flash restaurants have been sprouting up along the souless road to the airport, and I was recently refused entry into one of them because I was wearing flip-flops. I am not the kind of clientelle these places are hoping to attract.

Closer to home, in the centre of town, the government has started a massive cleaning-up-the-streets programme which means that the lepers who live on one corner of my road, and the wheelchair-bound women who live on the other side, have suddenly disappeared. Fruit sellers, the Burkinabe furniture makers, the peanut women, the boys selling phone top-up cards- they have almost all gone. The streets are empty, clean, and on odd corners lie piles of wood where make-shift shops have been dismantled and turned into firewood.

It has been remarkably quick. Armed soldiers came down and literally swept the lepers from their homes the night before last, and in the morning, there was nothing to be seen of them.

This afternoon I went looking for fruit. I could not find any. I couldn't bear to go to the corner where I buy my vegetables for fear that the lady, who calls herself my Senegalese mother and always sends me away with a squash for free, had been swept away too. On my way back home, I saw the furniture weaver tucked away on the corner of the road where he used to have his business. I asked him about it.

"Well, they didn't move us on but they were moving everyone else so we decided to hide in that derelict building," he pointed to a block of half- flats, "until it all passed."

We both remembered that this kind of attempt to get street traders off the streets had happened some years ago and after a couple of weeks, it all went back to normal, all was forgotten.

Turning the corner, I saw one of the handless lepers, an old man in a wooly bobble-hat, leaning up against a wall. Infront of him were two kids, about 7 years old, begging for food. The leper was dividing up a small piece of stale baguette and putting pieces into the kids's begging bowls.

There is something intrinsically wrong about enjoying tender rolls of smoked salmon, and canapes of avacado and succulent beef on the lawn of an African presidency. It is the second time in a week I have eaten fabulous food at the expense of the Senegalese state. Perhaps what feels wrong is how pleasant it is. Or how gullible the average man on the street seems when I step outside. I know it's nothing in comparison to the extraordinary extravagance of some of Africa's dictators long since gone, but I don't know how to comfortably be a part of it anyway.

The Harmattan, the wind that blows Saharan sand through every crack of the house and covers clothes, skin, hair, fridges and floors with dust, has arrived about two months early. In celebration, or preparation, I have fitted out my flat with house slippers. I searched high and low, and came across these lovely creatures.



Visitors, always welcome (but also encouraged out of habit to remive their shoes), will be provided with a pair of Twin Tower house-slippers on arrival to protect their feet from the dust.

In other news, I have been lusting after a pair of flip-flops, for the street, which are not ugly and do not bear the image of buildings or Osama Bin Laden beards. If anyone wants to send me some, or give me some for Christmas, I will be entirely grateful.

Now I need some advice. I want to make labels to sew into the patchwork things I make with Omar the tailor. What's a good name for us? I had previously thought of The Senegalese Patchwork Co-operative, and today thought of Chapa-chapa which is what they call patchwork in Guinea Bissau. Any ideas, anyone?

This evening I took a taxi from the beach back to my home in town. The driver spoke no French and looked barely old enough to be driving a car. I noticed he beeped his horn rather a lot, but said nothing. I then noticed, to my horror, that he drove like a manic and that his car could barely take the turns he was insiting on speeding around to overtake another car in the face of oncoming traffic. He beeped his horn some more and the driver of the car we were overtaking at the time made an angry hand gesture as we went by. I asked the boy why he used the horn so much.

"Me!" he shouted above the din of his rustbucket slamming over potholes. "Me, no", he went on, pointing at the horn at the same moment that it beeped, all of its own accord. "Connection," he went on.

I got it. The connection was dodgy and the horn was beeping on its own. But why did he have to drive so dangerously? I threatened to get out of the taxi if he didn't slow down, and he eventually did.

When he dropped me at my place and handed me the change, he said politely,

"Thankyou, Mama."

Labah Soseh, a well-known musician from the Gambia who played old-school Cuban salsa, sadly died recently and there were various obituaries in the papers which remembered his rich musical career and life. I nearly saw him perform once, in a small popular bar in Ziguinchor, where I used to live.

It was late on a Saturday night, and I went along to see what was happening at the bar. At one end of the dark room, past crowded tables with their plastic place-mats, instruments were set up but no one playing them. The manager, a smart-looking lady with a fierce voice that she was never afraid to use when one of her hired musicians misbehaved or turned up late, was standing in the corner bellowing. Some men were standing around giggling. I tried to follow the conversations to find out what was going on, and Tapha translated for me.

The musician, by this time in his seventies, had arrived to play his set, and a large audience had turned out to see him play. He insisted that the manager of the bar pay him before he start, which she did, so he took the money and started to sing. Half way through the gig, he apparently took a break and went to his nearby home with one of the bar's many prostitutes, using the money he had been paid for this evening's work. He then returned twenty minutes later and the manager was horrified to see that he had changed out of his smart outfit and shiny shoes and was now wearing a pair of flip-flops on his feet. She fired him on the spot. One has to ask who is the loser in all of this.

Sorry to drag my blog down to the level of a tv soap but I just finished watching every episode of Sex and the City ever made, or at least, it felt like it. So Carrie moves to a foreign country where she can't understand anyone and she doesn't have any friends. She hates it and her friends tell her to come back home. She makes tearful phone calls home from payphones and knows she made a big mistake, but doesn't know how to put it right without looking silly. Hmm, interesting.

Midnight. Stepping onto the ragged pavement outside a bar, I hissed at a passing taxi and it shuddered to a halt.

"I'm going to town. How much?" I asked the middle aged driver, who was wearing a worn white boubou and a blue wooly hat.

"Mil cinq cents," he said. "Is that OK?" He looked at me through the open passenger-side window.

"One thousand three hundred," I offered, knowing that with the change I had in my purse, that was the easiest amount.

Living in Senegal is tiring, and demanding. But when people ask me how it's tiring, I can't quite think of why. When you climb in a taxi in Dakar, not only do you have to bargain a price and deal with an irrate driver who knows you are rich from the colour of your skin and so assumes you are happy to pay more, but you must also instinctively know what's in your purse in the way of change. You don't have time to look and drivers may not have small notes or coins. If you end up at your destination and find out that you don't have the right money, then you just have to accept to pay more, or fight to pay less.

As the car rattled off along the dark road, he asked if I had the three hundred in change. He switched on a dim light so I could check, and I discovered that I was 10 francs (about one pence) off the right amount.

"No problem," he said sweetly. "Even if you were twenty five francs down, I'd let it go. I am tolerant." Switching the light off, he drove on.

We drove through the rough Medina neighbourhood, past girls sitting on the steps of a house while the boys made tea on a small charcoal burner, past fruit sellers with carts of plasticy apples and perfect plantation bananas. Everything seemed bright to me, shapes sharper, shadows more intriguing. Life feels intense again, and I feel more alive than I have in months. I have no idea why.

I spent my first month in Senegal, seven whole years ago, chasing Baaba Maal around the country and never, ever, meeting him. I know some of his musicians, family and friends, but seven years later, I have had more near misses with this Senegalese hero of mine, than I can now count.

Just as I consider that my life in Senegal may actually, one day, come to an end, I am starting to realise one of my few remaining Senegal dreams. To meet, interview and get to know, in some small way, this person who has inspired me through seven years of life in Africa, and life as a music journalist. I may finally be going to meet Baaba Maal.

On this Sunday afternoon, that prospect feels very, very good indeed.

Walking home from the pool, I happened on a song on my iPod which took me back to a feeling I had forgotten. Frank Sinatra, from an album I listened to when I was missing someone so much I thought I would just one day, simply cease being.

I walked through the darkening streets, listening, and passed the small Fula shop where I buy my gas. In a tall white building up above, I saw what I thought was a statue head posing in the window frame. It was a young black woman, a cloth covering her head as she gazed out the kitchen window. Framed in the adjacent window was her boss, watching the same evening scene, but from the heavily decorated living room window. Neither knew the other was there.

The holiday weekend. Everyone runs out to buy cloth. These remind me of women in burqas trapped behind bars.

I go into an office furniture shop to buy a swivel chair. I choose it, under the blank glare of a bored shop assistant, and go to the cash desk to pay.

I notice three credit card machines at the till.

"Oh!" I say, excited. "I can pay with a card?"

The assistant sucks her teeth at me. She half-closes her eyes to show that she is displeased. I have already said I will pay by cash and to change now would require her replacing a word on my bill with another.

"We prefer cash," she says, crawling over the words, every syllable a tremendous effort.

"I prefer to pay with a card," I say. I am, after all, the customer, I think, mistakenly.

She turns her head to the lady at the till, her eyes lingering over me as if she wishes me a painful death.

"The card machine doesn't work," says the lady behind the till.

There. That sorted that one out. Both ladies smile at me, unkindly.

I always though it an unkind stereotype that African women give birth and then carry on with their work.

This afternoon, I was chatting with M., the delightful woman who twice a week comes by, cleans my house and takes me from my solitary freelance hell. We talked about her impending birth.

"Aren't you tired yet,?" I asked her as she mopped the floors infront of me. I was sitting on the sofa fanning myself with a wicker fan, sweat running down my arms.

"No," M. giggled, herself sweating in the extraordinary heat.

"When I was pregant with my other son, I worked until nine months. On the Tuesday, I went to work and made breakfast for my boss. I cleaned the house as usual. Then I made the lunch." Still mopping the floors, every now and then whipping a cloth out of her housecoat andd giving something a polish, she laughed as she remembered the story.

"I carried on making the lunch until I couldn't go on. I called my boss and he took me to the hospital. At one pm, I gave birth to Mark."

Dakar is quite literally, on fire.

"A-ou?", the man in the scruffy blue security uniform barked at me as I tried to walk through the British Airways office door.

"A-ou?" I asked, incredulous "What does 'a-ou' mean?"

"Foi djem?" he replied, asking me in Wolof where I was going.

I think what you wanted to say was, 'Madam, can I help you?'. But I resisted the urge to say to this him, because he wouldn't get the irony.

Every building, car parking space and square inch of land in Dakar has a guard, from a man officially employed by a security company to stand with a baton infront of the office door, to a young boy who hangs out waiting for someone to park his car so he can earn some money looking after it. Even though these people belong to one of the friendliest populations on earth, once they get a cap and a uniform, they become gruff, mistrusting and often downright rude.

"Is there a press conference today?" I ask the guard at the ministry, knowing full well that there is but that I have not been invited.

"The press is here, yes," he says, questioningly, looking me up and down with a doubtful glare.

"Can I come in then?" I say, moving to get my press card from my bag.

" Well who are you?!" he shouts, turning to face me and drawing his large frame up to what feels like double my size.

"I'm press..." I say, feeling small.

The guard turns my card over and inspects it for a long time. "OK, go in," he conceeds, disappointed.

I go into the salle de presse and the air conditioning is on so high that the air is icy. The room, layered with red velvet curtains and stuffed full of highly polished wooden furniture, is also stuffed full of journalists. The ministers have not arrived yet, and when they do it is not the minister who I had expected to be there. A mis-print in the announcement in the paper means I was expecting someone from another country.

At the prime minister's office, the guards are more friendly. There are many more of them, perhaps giving them less chance to play the policeman.

I arrive at the impressively white building and am met by a policeman, a real one, wearing dark glasses and high leather boots. He is standing in full sun and I want to move into the shade but am afraid to move past the man, who no doubt carries a gun somewhere on that belt, in case he should think I was making a run for the prime minister himself.

I tell him I have a meeting with Mr. D. He almost smiles and waves me towards a guard in a cabin, just inside the front door.
Beside the guard's cabin is a suitcase which is half-covered in the celephane they use at airports. If it is half wrapped or half unwrapped I am not sure.

The second guard is polite. He adresses me as 'Vous' and 'Madam'. He asks my name. I tell him, but he struggles, as everyone does in this country, with the pronunciation. Eventually we decide on 'Kelton', which everyone can say. He shows me into a room, jammed full of sofas, too many for the space, and closes the heavy louvered doors, waving his hand infront of the air conditioner to check it is working. A moment later he comes back and gets a bag out of the gray cupboard wedged in the corner of the room. He puts something away in the bag, slides it back into place, and has to rearrange the cupboard door which has fallen off in the process.

"Yes, yes, hang on..." rustling amongst papers, lifting up files and discovering the telephone underneath.

"Yes, somewhere here I have a business card," says the ministerial press attache, who knows as well as I do that no such card exists.

"Oh," he looks at me with charmingly forlorn eyes, turning his back on the desk. "C'est fini."

This one is different. He had a card, which he sat down underneath the image of Jesus to write upon, and gave me his home phone number and postal address too.

It is the end of a long week, long because the heat is excrutiating, and because I can't seem to motivate myself to work. Nothing much is happening in the news; I have never known it this quiet. It is probably the quiet before the storm, or the fact that during Ramadan and The Heat, which have come together this year, no one can do anything of any use.

But on Fridays, a certain Central Bank in the region issues its treasury bill results. They have not been posted on the website so I opened my contacts spreadsheet and quickly picked off a number next to the name M.

"Hello M!" I positively bellowed down the phone. "This is Rose in Dakar!"

"Ah! Hello Rose," said the voice at the other end, which brought back memories of deep laughs and large bellies. "I thought you had abandoned me! I'm so happy to hear your voice."

We chatted a little about the weather and Ramadan and I told him I was joining my friends to break the fast with them this evening.

"And have you seen your friend, the governor, yet?" M. asked.

I was silent. Why was the treasury bill man asking me about the governor of another regional bank, who for six months I have been trying in interview, with no success?

Unless I wasn't talking to that M. I was infact talking to the other M. The Governor himself. They share the same name.

Once I realised that I had rung the mobile phone of the Governor by mistake, my face went cold and my hands, gripping the telephone receiver, went clammy. How could I have rung him and been so informal and friendly? He must think me very rude.

"No," I stammered. "I haven't been able to get him yet. His press people tell me he is very busy and can't possibly see me."

"Well," said M. incredulously, annoyed. "I will ring him myself and tell him he must see you. I know he would be delighted to meet with you if only he knew about you."

"Well thanks!" I had recovered by then, realising that west Africans love to be friendly and ring eachother up for no reason other than to say hi. People probably don't just ring up the Governor of the Central Bank for no reason, but then, we had shared tea and McVities Digestives in his office and got along just fine. We are friends now.

In Senegal during the holy month of Ramadan everything shuts down. The man on the corner who usually sells me newspapers is rarely there at 8 as he usually is, and there is a lot less traffic than usual. Friends who have never been grumpy start being short with me and I can walk all the way through Sandaga market without anyone trying to sell me phone credit. Clubs are empty or shut; those who do go out do so discretely.

On Saturday night, I went with two friends visiting from London to see Souleyman Faye play, forgetting it was Ramadan and the night was likely to be a quiet one. When we go to the bar, it was empty save for Souleymane and two band members sitting in a dark corner. Undeterred, I went over to announce our arrival. He humoured me, and got up to start the gig. A bass guitar, Souleyman on the lead, and Aziz, his faithful sabar drum player.



Even though there were only a handful of people in the audience, or perhaps because there were only a few people there, he gave it everything. Always introducing the song with some amusing anecdote in French or Wolof, he had the audience laughing before starting on a heart-breaking Wolof version of ‘ne me quitte pas’ or a rocking tale of the spirits of Dakar. He has an extraordinary voice, one which can make you forget there are only three people on stage when there should be seven and which can make you feel you are alone in the room with just the music, sung for you.

His final song launched mid-way into a cover of Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s get it on’. He gave it a go, and it could have gone so badly wrong, but it totally worked.

www.myspace.com/souleymanfaye

*****

Minding my own business on Saturday, I noticed that what I thought was an ant bite on my leg had grown more swollen and itchy in the three days I had had it. On closer inspection, I noticed a black spot. On prodding with a needle, I had hooked a black tumba worm out of my leg.

These nasty little creatures come about when the fly lays an egg on wet sand or clothes hanging out to dry. You sit on the sand, or put the clothes on, and the larvae burrows into your skin. The egg hatches and a worm grows. Eventually, I imagine (mine never got the chance), it becomes a fly, and the whole process begins again. I’ve never heard of these worms in Senegal; it is much too tame here. But since regaling my friends with my war story, I’ve discovered that loads of people have had them, or know people who have, and they’re really rather common garden. What a disappointment.